(~2 minutes to read)
Why do we do a headcount for the living and a body count for the dead?
People’s heads and bodies don’t necessarily need to be connected for them to be dead. The same cannot be said for the living; for the most part, they tend to be intact.
And ironically, until finger prints and DNA became viable ways to identify a person, the head was usually needed in order to make a positive ID.
Before I continue, I should offer an apology for the ghoulish tone of this piece. Being of British extraction, my sense of humour and my propriety filters are set more leniently than many, although, perversely, this topic is likely more acceptable to North Americans than naughty bit humour. But apology offered, nonetheless.
Back in the day, war used to consist mostly of hacking pieces off your enemies until you either ran out of enemies or your enemies ran out of pieces to be hacked off. A gruesome business, but since most of us butchered our own meat, and since our incentive to butcher our enemy was the sure knowledge that they would rape and kill our women and children if we didn’t, I can’t help thinking that lopping a few arms and heads off was a small price to pay.
But now we’ve got a field covered in body bits—it must have looked like a very untidy “Pick Your Part” for Frankenstein wannabes. And someone (I nearly wrote “somebody”) has to work out who’s been killed so they can break the news to the nearest and dearest affected.
Battles involving certain peoples—the ancient Celts for example—might result in the battlefield being head-free. (The Celts’ post-battle headcount was literal.) There being no system of dog tags back in those days (I’m only guessing!), and in the absence of fingerprint and DNA technology, identification of the dead would have to have relied on knowing who’s unaccounted for, plus scars, clothing, tattoos, jewellery, or piercings.
“Well… both Anwell and Cardew had that kind of a scar on their left forearms, but only Cardew had that dragon’s head piercing… there; so I’d say that this is Cardew.”
“How d’ya know Cardew had that piercing… there, but Anwell didn’t?”
“When you’re in the shower after a hard day’s slaughter, you notice these things, ‘specially when you’re as short as I am.”
So if the above-reported conversation is anywhere near authentic (and I have no evidence to support any claim that it is!) then belly button piercing is not the relatively recent novelty that we think it is.
Again, why do we use “headcount” for the living? It reduces us to the same status as cabbages or lettuce or cattle. We’re not vegetables, and although in the big cities we’re squeezed into far too small a space (which must be the inspiration for feedlots), we aren’t cattle (although I’ve heard the economy class in airplanes referred to as “cattle class” for reasons no doubt not unconnected with feedlots.)
So if “headcount” is (or should be!) politically incorrect, what are the alternatives? Heart count? Pancreas count? Or should we tempt the counters-of-the-dead with the alliterative “corpse count” so that “body count” is freed up to refer to living humans?
All in all, a totally pointless topic. I think I must be losing my head.