Why do we do a headcount for the living and a body count for the dead?<\/p>\n
People\u2019s heads and bodies don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t, I can\u2019t help thinking that lopping a few arms and heads off was a small price to pay.<\/p>\n
But now we\u2019ve got a field covered in body bits\u2014it must have looked like a very untidy \u201cPick Your Part\u201d for Frankenstein wannabes. And someone (I nearly wrote \u201csomebody<\/em>\u201d) has to work out who\u2019s been killed so they can break the news to the nearest and dearest affected.<\/p>\n Battles involving certain peoples\u2014the ancient Celts for example\u2014might result in the battlefield being head-free. (The Celts\u2019 post-battle headcount was literal.) There being no system of dog tags back in those days (I\u2019m only guessing!), and in the absence of fingerprint and DNA technology, identification of the dead would have to have relied on knowing who\u2019s unaccounted for, plus scars, clothing, tattoos, jewellery, or piercings.<\/p>\n \u201cWell\u2026 both Anwell and Cardew had that kind of a scar on their left forearms, but only Cardew had that dragon\u2019s head piercing\u2026 there; so I\u2019d say that this is Cardew.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cHow d\u2019ya know Cardew had that piercing\u2026 there, but Anwell didn\u2019t?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re in the shower after a hard day\u2019s slaughter, you notice these things, \u2018specially when you\u2019re as short as I am.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Again, why do we use \u201cheadcount\u201d for the living? It reduces us to the same status as cabbages or lettuce or cattle. We\u2019re not vegetables, and although in the big cities we\u2019re squeezed into far too small a space (which must be the inspiration for feedlots), we aren\u2019t cattle (although I\u2019ve heard the economy class in airplanes referred to as \u201ccattle class\u201d for reasons no doubt not unconnected with feedlots.)<\/p>\n So if \u201cheadcount\u201d 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 \u201ccorpse count\u201d so that \u201cbody count\u201d is freed up to refer to living humans?<\/p>\n All in all, a totally pointless topic. I think I must be losing my head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why do we do a headcount for the living and a body count for the dead? People\u2019s heads and bodies don\u2019t 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… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181],"tags":[664,299,300,302,301,298],"class_list":["post-574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fake","tag-500words","tag-body-count","tag-cabbage","tag-cattle-class","tag-feedlot","tag-headcount"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1545,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions\/1545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}