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One Thousand Words on the topic of Scissors.

Let us get the Seinfeldian joke out of the way immediately:  "Why can you never have just a single scissor?"  The answer is that you absolutely can, it's just that American usage restricts it to the plural.  While we're at it, "Why do they call it a pair of pants?", "What's the deal with airline food?" and "Have you ever noticed that men and women are different?"  Is that out of our system now?  Good.  Moving on, then.

Scissors are a dreadfully useful thing, and a thing enough of which I never quite have handy.  Every time I visit IKEA (which is distressingly often, as I sometimes go there even when I've no need to purchase furniture simply to browse the wares and sit in their sample rooms; it rather tends to make me fear that my own personal Tyler Durden is going to appear at the top of the escalator and beat me up whilst lecturing me on the folly of choosing a dinette set that defines me as a person), I pick up a pack of three scissors of graduated sizes which they offer for a dollar, and any time I see shears at a decent rate at any other store, I buy those, as well; by now I must have purchased at least seventeen pairs of scissors, yet I can never seem to find a pair when I need them.  I've taken to stashing them all around the house, but all that results is stumbling across them when not needed - usually by stabbing myself in the hand while reaching too hastily into a drawer.  When I actually want to trim the budgerigar's wing feathers, or snip out a bit of newsprint, or trim some string, they're nowhere to be found.  Even the ones in my sewing desk, kept especially for cutting fabric and tailoring, are wont to wander off if I'm not particularly vigilant.

My sewing scissors are only a pair of rather decent shears with a plastic handle.  They're nothing special, nothing like my mother's.  She instilled in me a great respect for THE SEWING SHEARS - large stainless steel articles which must always be written in all capital letters.  If you ever attempted to use THE SEWING SHEARS to cut paper, or cardboard, or anything at all other than fabric, THE SEWING SHEARS would immediately go so dull that they would actually turn into little snub-nosed kindergarten scissors before your eyes, the blades shortening and the tips going round and the handles transmogrifying into plastic as you watched in horror.  Then Mom would come in and see you, and see the empty spot on her scissors rack where THE SEWING SHEARS belonged, and she would know.  Then the world would come to an end.

THE SEWING SHEARS were kept sharpened to within an inch of their life.  Not only could they cut through fabric, they could cut through the fabric of space-time itself.  This was how my mother managed to make my entire first-grade wardrobe out of a yard of navy blue fabric with red apples printed on, and my sister's dress to go visit her beau in prison out of the green velvet curtains from the drawing room.

I carry a Swiss Army knife on my keychain, but it is not the model with the tiny pair of scissors secreted within.  My fiancé's Swiss Army knife does have scissors in it, but they are less than useless; there is no tension to the blades, so they've been reduced to essentially tiny metal chopsticks.  I usually find it easier to just use the knife blade itself, unless what I'm trying to do is pick up tiny bits of rice, in which case I use actual chopsticks.  At any rate, the scissors have absolutely no utility in this modern world.

Scissors are something of an annoyance because they cannot be readily sharpened at home.  Knives can be sharpened at home; cavalry sabres can be sharpened at home; scissors must needs be taken to the scissor-grinder, which summons to my mind at least an image of an elderly Italian man with a waxed handlebar mustache pedalling the crank of an old-fashioned grindstone in such a way that it somehow produces hurdy-gurdy music while he sharpens the blades and his fez-sporting monkey does a little dance and begs for pennies.  Sadly the reality is much less picturesque, just as the real-life chimney sweep my mother once hired proved not to be a lovable Cockney with a beat-up top hat and an orphaned urchin sidekick but a fat man with a wife beater and a vacuum cleaner on a stick.  The scissor-grinder my mother employed for sharpening THE SEWING SHEARS was a middle-aged gent with a dour face and a decided air that he was Doing Us A Favor by allowing us to pay him money to sharpen THE SEWING SHEARS.  If only he had known their dread fabric-of-space-time powers, he may have shown us more respect.

Harkening back to the very beginning of this essay, one would assume given that we refer to the item as "a pair of scissors" that if one were to disassemble it into its two component blades each one would itself be "a scissor."  This, however, is sadly incorrect.  If one were to disassemble a pair of scissors into two component blades, one would have a pair of letter openers instead.  Also, it is almost impossible to get the two halves back together, particularly in a timely manner, particularly if the pair of scissors in question was the pair known as THE SEWING SHEARS - so my recommendation to you, Gentle Reader, is that you find a place to hide the letter openers thus created, and then move to Tijuana under an assumed name before my mother figures out what has happened.