| The scissors’ simple symmetry — that balanced arrangement which
Aristotle called one of the “chief forms of beauty” — is its most
impressive quality, a force that has led us, for no logical reason, to
adopt the phrase “a pair of scissors.” Huh? The scissors, with their
sharpened steel blades, their looped handles for our thumbs and fingers,
their central pivot, are one unit: a perfect machine, dependent on leverage.
Like the pulley, the scissors seems, after so many centuries, not trump-able
under physical law. The one side needs the other, as the one hand needs the
other to clap. Benjamin Franklin likened the incompleteness of a solitary scissors
blade to the plight of the single man.
We have special scissors for cutting steel or satin,
cuticles or cattle hair, for trimming wicks or shaping
hats, for making buttonholes. There are scissors designed
for left-handers. Any of the models will cut paper and
be blunted by rock — as in the child’s game — and no
household object, save perhaps the match, yields such
a landmark in our young lives. “He’s allowed to use
scissors,” whispers the three year old, regarding the
older child with awe. We are shown just how to hold
them and told never to run with them, and then, sitting
at a low table or on a playroom floor, we begin to
cut. Then we go on using the scissors — whether as dressmakers
or homemakers, artists or chefs, journalists or surgeons
or business tycoons — for the rest of our lives.
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