Hi All,
Stepped in late, but this discussion is sort of like the Spanish conquistadors, who, when writing about the Andes, called Llamas sheep and temples mosques, because those were the referents they had to explain the strange things they were seeing. They didn't have the categorical words to work with.
Similarly, dagger vs. knife is one of my three examples of areas where "everyone knows what the difference is," until you try to categorize something.
The three examples are: tree vs. shrub, sword vs. knife, and dagger vs. knife. We could also argue sword vs. saber, if we wanted.
I won't bore you with the tree vs. shrub, but a great example is a machete.
Is it a sword, a knife, or a saber (or is it a type of sword termed a saber)? We've seen all three used for a machete, especially in historical literature.
While I appreciate David's scholarship, I think we would be even better served by coming up with a term for these kinds of vague distinctions, just so we know when we're wandering into these poorly defined debates. Something that signals "Oh yeah, we're having on of THOSE discussions again" would be a good thing.
So far as this discussion goes, I'd heard the knife being single edge (often curved) while a dagger is two-edged (usually straight). I think that one may go back to Roman times, where the pugio and the gladius (straight and two-edged) were Roman and single edged and curved weapons (like the sica) were foreign.
Other thoughts on the concepts of knife vs. dagger:
--a dagger is a specialized knife, when it comes right down to it.
--Knives tend to be tools for cutting things, and often titled by their use. That's why we tend to talk about "combat knives" (it's a knife used for combat), utility knives, and survival knives. Daggers tend to be weapons, defined by who uses them (it's a commando dagger, not a combat dagger, for instance). Offhand, I can't think of a "utility dagger" or "survival dagger," although there are certainly straight, two-edged survival and utility knives. These are tendencies, with many, many exceptions among the knives.
--Purpose-built weapons tend to be linked by name to groups of warriors or soldiers (i.e. an Afridi stabbing dagger), whether they're knives or daggers. A Marine Raider's Knife is a pretty narrow category, even though it's a specialized clip-tip knife. Alternatively, they're given a specialized name (like a smachet).
We can go onto the differences between knives and swords, and swords, sabers, and cutlasses, but it's off the subject.
My 0.0000002 centavos,
F
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