Afridi Dagger ?

[Queequeg]

Spiral,

At first, I thought maybe you misunderstood me. However, after rereading your post, I think you're probably right.

I assumed that the author knew the difference between a knife and a dagger, so I was stuck looking for a double-edged blade. I now think it's most likely that he makes no difference between them and the picture you linked is what I was looking for.

Thanks!

[David]

Originally Posted by Queequeg

I assumed that the author knew the difference between a knife and a dagger, so I was stuck looking for a double-edged blade. I now think it's most likely that he makes no difference between them and the picture you linked is what I was looking for.

I just spent a bit of time researching the definition of dagger on the web. Just about all sources define it as a short, pointed knife used primarily for stabbing. Of all the sources i check only one (Wikipedia) mentions that it is "typically" double-edged, though it doesn't say always. The gist of all the definitions seems to be that daggers are intended for stabbing, not slashing. Seems to me that according to these definitions a Pesh Kabz could indeed be properly referred to as a dagger.

[spiral]

Thanks Queequeg, it seemed the logical choice to me given the Indian subcontenant rather than African location & use of the term Afridi in that case meaning Pathan & that the often interchageability of both descriptive knife/dagger terms in common usage. [As i thought!}

Great stuff David! Thank you! I live & learn, I was always brought up to belive a knife was single edged for cutting & a dagger double edged for stabbing{although obviously knives can still stab etc.} & must admit I have never actualy researched into it.

Those lessons mostly came from my father & other WW2 mostly Burma & Chindit or Royal marine veterans. I wonder if that was how the British army/Navy used to name them? or perhaps just commen usage in the area I grew up? {Thames Valley, England.] It would be fascinating to know!

Interesting that Queequeg had the same understanding too.

spiral

[fearn]

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

[stephen wood]

...in the West Indies a machete is called a cutlass