Dagger (pronounced dag-er)
(1) A short, double-edged weapon with a pointed blade and
a handle, used historically for personal protection in close combat (although
some were weighted for throwing), but since the development of side-arms,
increasing only for ceremonial purposes (many produced without sharpened edges).
(2) In typography a mark (†) used to indicate a cross
reference, especially a footnote (also called obelisk). The double dagger (‡) is also used.
(3) In sport and military strategy, a offence which thrusts
deep into opposition territory on a short front.
(4) In glaciology, the long, conical ice-formations formed
from drops of water (al la the stalactites in caves).
(5) In the slang of clinical medicine, anything that
causes pain like a stabbing injury (typically, some sort of barb)
(6) In basketball & American football, a point scored
near the end of the game (clutch time) to take or increase the scorer's team
lead.
(7) In nautical architecture, as daggerboard, a
retractable centre-board that slides out to act as a keel; a timber placed
diagonally in a ship's frame.
(8) To stab with a dagger or similar bladed weapon
(archaic).
(9) In typography, to mark with a dagger (obelisk).
1380s: From the Middle English daggere, daggare & dagard, probably an adaptation from the thirteenth century Old French dague (dagger), from the Old Provençal or Italian daga of obscure origin but related to the Occitan, Italian & Spanish daga, the Dutch dagge, the German Degen, the Middle Low German dagge (knife's point), the Old Norse daggarðr, the Danish daggert, the Faroese daggari, the Welsh dager & dagr, the Breton dac and the Albanian thikë (a knife, dagger) & thek (to stab, to pierce with a sharp object). Etymologists have speculated on the source of dagger, some suggesting a Celtic origin. Others prefer the unattested Vulgar Latin daca & dacian (knife) (the name from the Roman province), from the Classical Latin adjective dācus while an entry in an eighteenth century French dictionary held the French dague was from the German dagge & dagen (although not attested until much later). More speculatively still is the notion of some link with the Old Armenian դակու (daku) (adze, axe), an alternative to which is some connection with the primitive Indo-European dāg-u-, suggesting something cognate with the Ancient Greek θήγω (thḗgō) (to sharpen, whet). Dagger is a noun & verb, daggering is a noun & verb, daggerman & daggerpoint are nouns, daggerlike is an adjective and daggered is a verb; the noun plural is daggers.
The association of the dagger with knightly
weaponry can be traced back to French writings in the twelfth century while the
other Middle Latin forms included daga, dagga, dagha, dagger, daggerius,
daggerium, dagarium, dagarius & diga (the words with the -r- being late
fourteenth century adoptions of the English word. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists an
English verb dag (to stab) from which dagger as a verb could be derived but the
verb is attested only from the turn of the fifteenth century. Long used as a weapon of personal protection,
skilled sixteenth & seventeenth century swordsmen would use one in their
other (usually left) hand to parry thrusts from the opponent's rapier. It was a high-risk technique. The use in texts as a reference mark (also
called the obelisk) dates from 1706. The
wonderfully named “bollock dagger” was a dagger with a distinctively shaped
shaft having two oval swellings at the guard resembling the male testes (the polite term was “kidney dagger”). An “ear dagger” was used in the late medieval
period and gained the name from its distinctive, ear-shaped pommel. In slang, to be “stabbed with a Bridport
dagger” was to be executed by hanging, the origin of that being the district of
Bridport in Dorset being a major producer of the hemp fibre used in the
production of the ropes used by hangmen.
In idiomatic use, to “look daggers at” is to stare at someone angrily or
threateningly, something one would do if “at daggers drawn” (in a state of open
hostility) with them.
Other names for the short bladed weapon included stiletto & poniard. Stiletto was from the Italian stiletto; doublet of stylet, the construct being stil(o) (dagger or needle (from the Latin stilus (stake, pens))) + -etto (-ette). From the Latin stilus came also stelo, an inherited doublet. Stilus was from the primitive Indo-European (s)teyg- (related to instīgō & instigare) and was cognate with the Ancient Greek στίζω (stízō) (to mark with a pointed instrument) and the Proto-Germanic stikaną (to stick, to stab). Despite the similarity, there’s no relationship with the Ancient Greek στῦλος (stûlos) (a pillar). The -etto suffix was from the Late Latin -ittum, accusative singular of –ittus and was an alternative suffix used to form melioratives, diminutives and hypocoristics. The noun plural is either stilettos or stilettoes and stilettolike (appearing also as stiletto-like) is an adjective. A technical adoption in law-enforcement and judicial reports were the verb-forms stilettoed & stilettoing, referring to a stabbing or killing with a stiletto-like blade. It was a popular description used by police when documenting the stabbing by wives of husbands or boyfriends with scissors or kitchen knives; use faded in the early twentieth century. The use of “stiletto heel” to describe the elegant, narrow high heel in women's shoes dates from as recently as 1953. Poniard (a dagger or other short, stabbing weapon) dates from the 1580s and was from the early sixteenth century French poinard, from the Old French poignal (dagger (literally “anything grasped with the fist”)), from poing (fist), from the Latin pungus (a fist (a pugio being “a dagger”)), from a suffixed form of the primitive Indo-European root peuk- (to prick). It’s thought it was probably altered in French by association with poindre (to stab). It was used a verb from the turn of the seventeenth century in the sense of “to stab with or as if with a poniard”.
The dagger was the standard 1935 issue for Luftwaffe officers. Updated in 1937 and fashioned always with a 260 mm (10¼ inch) blade, the pommel and crossguard were aluminum, bearing the swastika (occasionally finished in anodized gold) on the pommel face with a Luftwaffe flighted eagle and swastika on the crossguard. The grips were celluloid over a wood base and in various production runs they were finished in colors ranging from pure white to a deep orange. The scabbards were all in anodized grayish blue steel with a striped decoration on the body face with an oak leaf pattern on the face of the drag. Worn suspended from straps bearing twin silver stripes on a dark grayish blue background with square buckles, it featured a short aluminum cord knot. In an example of the expanding list of recipients entitled to wear a dagger, after 1940, authorization was extended to non-commissioned officers though without the portepee (the sword-knot which denoted an officer’s right to bear a sword). Although it's not clear why, the 1935 Luftwaffe dagger was apparently the template for a range of similar items commissioned by the foreign ministry to used as gifts for one reason or another. Many embassies and other overseas delegations received them although if there were guidelines suggesting how they were to be allocated, no copies are known to have survived. The ones ordered for diplomatic use were genuine replicas of the shape and construction (although embellished with symbols of the state or Nazi party rather than anything military) but the manufacturer also did a line of miniatures in display cases and even some letter-openers (!) which seem to have been a purely commercial product rather than anything official although, adorned with the swastika, in the nature of the way things happened in the Third Reich, a commission likely was paid to someone.
Cheryl sees Hermann Göring: This fragment is from the opening sequences for one of the television shows of English comedian Alexei Sayle (b 1952), a left-wing activist most active during the administration of Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013; UK prime-minister 1979-1990) when there was much for such folk about which to be active. His depictions of Benito Mussolini (1883-1945; Duce (leader) & Prime-Minister of Italy 1922-1943) were in the absurdist tradition and very well done.
Göring’s baton would be replaced with an even more extravagant, jewel-encrusted creation when in 1940 he was appointed Reichsmarschall (a sort of “six star general” although really a sop to his vanity because at the same time Hitler created a dozen field marshals in recognition of the Wehrmacht’s success in the Western campaigns in 1940) and it's now on display in the US Army's West Point Museum at Highland Falls, New York. Convicted of by the IMT (international Military Tribunal) at the first Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946 1946) on all four counts ((1) conspiracy to wage aggressive war, (2) waging aggressive war, (3) war crimes & (4) crimes against humanity, Göring was sentenced to be hanged but, shortly before the scheduled hour, he committed suicide by crushing between his teeth an ampule of a potassium cyanide (KCN), smuggled into his cell in circumstances never confirmed. For decades it was not uncommon for historians to refer to Göring taking “prussic acid” (the older name for hydrogen cyanide (HCN)) but while they’re related, KCN is the potassium salt of HCN: KCN is a stable storage form of cyanide, while HCN is a volatile liquid or gas.
Daggers out: The Night of the Long Knives
Germans have long adored uniforms and especially prized are the accessories, among the most distinctive of which are ceremonial daggers. During the Third Reich, a period in which many institutions of state were increasingly re-ordered along military lines, the issuing of ceremonial daggers was at its most widespread and in addition to the expected recipients in the army, navy & air force, the SS, the SA, the Hitlerjugend (the HJ, (Hitler Youth)), the diplomatic service and the police, they were also part of the uniforms of organizations such as the fire department, the postal & telegraph service, the forest service, the labor service, the customs service the railway & waterways protective service and the miners association. While it’s true that in Germany daggers had in the past been issued even to civilians, under the Nazis the scale and scope proliferated and they seem to have exerted a particular fascination within the ranks of the SS.
The SS (ᛋᛋ in Armanen runes; Schutzstaffel (literally “protection squadron” but translated variously as “protection squad”, “security section" etc) was formed (under different names) in 1923 as a Nazi party squad to provide security at public meetings (then often rowdy and violet affairs) and was later re-purposed as a personal bodyguard for Adolf Hitler. The SS name was adopted in 1925 and during the Third Reich the institution evolved into a vast economic, industrial and military apparatus more than two million strong to the point where some historians (and contemporaries) regarded it as a kind of “state within a state”. The Waffen-SS (armed SS (ie equipped with military-grade weapons)) existed on a small scale as early as 1933 before Hitler’s agreement was secured to create a formation at divisional strength and growth was gradual even after the outbreak of hostilities in 1939; it was the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 which triggered the Waffen-SS’s expansion into a multi-national armoured force with over 900,000 men under arms. As well as the SS’s role in the administration of the many concentration and extermination camps, the Waffen-SS was widely implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The cover photograph of Göring in Luftwaffe (German Air Force) field marshal’s uniform with baton and sword was a study by Heinrich Hoffmann (1885–1957), Hitler’s court photographer. The sword was a bespoke one-off manufactured by the Eickhorm company to mark his wedding on 10 April 1935, the pommel engraved with a facsimile of the Pour Le Merite (the “Blue Max”) he was awarded during his World War I (1914-1918) service as a pilot with the Jagdgeschwader (fighter squadron) 1 (better remembered as von Richthofen’s Flying Circus (named after the squadron's leader Manfred von Richthofen (Baron von Richthofen or "the Red Baron"; 1892–1918)). Unlike his Reichsmarschall's creation, the baton he carried after being appointed a field marshal in February 1938 (also a sop after Hitler had sense enough not to appoint him Minister of Defense) was similar in size & style to earlier German versions.
The Sturmabteilung (SA and translated usually as Storm Troopers) was the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary formation. It played a significant role in the party’s success, used extensively to provide security at gatherings or political events and they were notorious for their street-fighting with communists and other opponents. Even before the party gained power in 1933, the death toll associated with the SA was in the hundreds, mostly from battles on the streets although some murders really were assassinations, planned and otherwise. Although the SA had been essential in Hitler’s rise to power, once he’d taken control of the state (and crucially, the military), the ongoing presence of literally millions of unruly SA street thugs became not merely an embarrassment but also a genuine threat to regime stability. Accordingly, Hitler, on the pretext the SA’s leadership was about to stage a revolt (the so-called “Röhm putsch”, named after the SA chief Ernst Röhm (1887–1934)) in June 1934 conducted an operation which came to be called Nacht der langen Messer (Night of the Long Knives) during which as many as 180 were murdered, including some innocent bystanders who were what would now be called “collateral damage”. It was a remarkably successful (if bloody) operation and illustrated like nothing before that a bunch of violent gangsters had taken over the country: Hitler had in his hand the baton and had no intention of “passing it on” or allowing it to be prized from his grip. Notably, although Hitler (like most of Germany), had for years been well aware Röhm was a most active “confessed homosexual”, to hear his words of disgusted outrage after the pre-dawn raid (which, as head of state, personally he’d led, pistol in hand!), one would have thought he’d discovered “such depravity” only when he’d had Röhm and his SA cadre dragged from each other’s beds.
The “mission creep” which resulted in so many deaths was the consequence of many party figures taking advantage of the chaos to dispose of enemies, rivals or simply those against who they held some grievance. Even Hitler, who’d reckoned on a manageable handful of dead bodies, seems to have been shocked at the extent of the bloodbath but soon rose to the occasion and ensured it was all retrospectively declared a lawful defense of the state. At that point he realized his control was as absolute as it need to be and he never forgot the lesson the success of this pre-emptive strike. In January 1941, while contemplating the invasion of Russia, he advised Ion Antonescu (1882–1946; wartime fascist dictator of Romania) how to solve the similar problem presented by Horia Sima (1906–1993; fascist politician and head of Romania’s wartime fascist paramilitary formations), telling him: “You have to get rid of them. In every movement there are fanatic militants who think that in destroying they are doing their duty. These people must not be allowed to act.” Within days Antonescu acted on this helpful advice and solved his (immediate) problem although unlike the murdered Röhm, Sima lived to 86, unlike the unfortunate Antonescu who, convicted for some of his crimes by the "People's Court" of Romania's new communist government, was in 1946 executed.
The SS was an outgrowth of the SA, something which wasn’t planned but, in a manner typical of the way things were done in the Third Reich, was a consequence of factional empire-building and manoeuvrings to gain power and influence. Until the outbreak of war in 1939 when they adopted field grey, the SS wore black (Hitler, always sceptical of Heinrich Himmler’s (1900–1945; Reichsführer SS 1929-1945) mysticism and general weirdness would, in moments of annoyance at their antics, call them der schwarze Nebel (the black mist)) uniforms, many of which were tailored by Hugo Boss, something on which that fashion house’s documents of corporate history don’t much dwell; it is a myth Hugo Boss designed the SS uniforms, it handled only the production. The SS black was a choice but the SA’s brown was a thing of coincidence and economics because, after Germany’s defeat in World War I, the tropical colonies were lost so the state’s warehouses were packed with now surplus hot weather kit, most of the fabric in a shade like “desert brown”. To be taken seriously in Germany, one has to wear a uniform and because the surplus stock was available in great quantity and at a low price, it was purchased by the right-wing nationalist movement which ultimately coalesced into the Nazi Party, the SA thus gained the nickname “Brownshirts”, an allusion to the equally thuggish “Blackshirts” used in the 1920s by Mussolini as a fascist paramilitary. For the Italians, black had been a fashion choice but the Nazis ending being associated with brown just because of the strange circumstances. Strange circumstances like this do happen and the original “Air Force Blue” used for the uniforms of the UK’s RAF (Royal Air Force) was chosen simply because the Ministry of Supply was offered a significant discount on large quantities of a blue fabric ordered by the government of Imperial Russia, a contract abruptly abrogated by the Kremlin after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The “brown” association stuck (the party’s Munich headquarters was dubbed der Braunes Haus (the Brown House) and its officials (much despised variously for incompetence, corruption etc) wore uniforms in richer tones of brown, leading them to be labelled Goldfasane (golden pheasants), the derisive nickname used of high-ranking members (and their wives), the name an allusion to (1) the golden hue of the fabric of the party uniform, (2) their tendency to appear well fed (al la a plump pheasant fattened for slaughter) at a time when much of the population was living under food rationing and (3) their ostentation and self-importance (likened to a colorful and strutting pheasant).
Among their many mysterious rituals, the Freemasons also have their own lines of daggers which they claim are purely “ceremonial” but because all that they do is so shrouded in secrecy, the true nature of their purpose isn’t known, something of little consolation to those with a fear of being murdered by the Freemasons. It is however believed that the styles of daggers conferred reflect the grades and offices which evolved from the medieval craft guilds and presumably, the more exalted one’s place in the Masonic hierarchy, the more elaborate the dagger to which one is entitled. Top of the pile in a Masonic Lodge is the Worshipful Master, other intriguing titles including Senior Warden, Junior Warden, Chaplain, Senior Deacon, Junior Deacon, Steward, Tyler, Mentor and Almoner. Whether all get their own daggers or some share with others are among the many mysteries of Freemasonry. Of the even more opaque Secret Society of the Les Clefs d’Or, nothing is known about whether their rituals include the use of daggers, ceremonial or otherwise.
Randall Made Knives of Orlando, Florida: The Arkansas toothpick
To gain a sense of the way the folk in the state of Arkansas have long been perceived, consider the Arkansas toothpick, an impressive dagger produced usually in lengths between 12-20 inches (300-500 mm) and claimed to be ideal for “thrusting and slashing”. The weapon is said to be the creation of US knifemaker James Black (1800–1872) and is described by many historians as an “improved version” of the famous Bowie knife, the design of which was credited to James Bowie (1796–1836) who enjoyed the sort of varied career often seen south of the Mason-Dixon Line, his activities including land speculation (lawful and not, slave trading (mostly lawful) and military adventures (official and not). In truth, Mr Black’s original dagger seems to have been a slight variant of the Bowie knife because there’s little in documents from the nineteenth century to suggest the two were regarded as sufficiently different to be used for different purposes. The term “Arkansas Toothpick” seems first to have been used in the late 1820s or early 1830s by European travellers who told tales of the rugged characters they encountered in the backwoods of Arkansas, including them using long-bladed daggers to “pick their teeth”. Some have speculated the term might have pre-dated the debut of the Bowie knife in (circa 1830) and that the notion of two different knives evolved in the nineteenth century only because of this casual journalistic slang. However it happened, the Arkansas Toothpick and Bowie knife are now established items in the knifemakers’ catalogues.
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