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Comment by uhtred | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure I read somewhere that the reason we moved to having blunt knives and forks set at the table was because people used to frequently get into disagreements at the dinner table and stab each other, and so it became a requirement to leave one's dagger/sword whatever outside.

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I bet "frequently" here is kind of like how people think the cowboys in the Wild West of the United States had "frequent" shootings, even though it didn't.

As knife fights an shootings go, once a lifetime is once too many.

For what it’s worth I use my Tramontina kitchen knife [1] when eating, it’s not blunt at all, quite the contrary. I also never, ever start a fight or argument during eating, that is a thing my peasant grandma has taught me and my brother pretty well. Her reasoning was something like “if you start an argument during dinner you’re not enjoying the food that all of our family worked pretty hard to put on the table so by doing that you’re disrespecting them and most importantly you’re disrespecting their hard work”.

[1] https://www.mychefknives.co.uk/932-tramontina-knives

I believe there is also an etiquette that tells to put a knife down with the cutting side facing inwards towards your plate (ie: not towards your enemy sitting next to you). As otherwise it might be seen as a hostile gesture/provocation.

Huh. Always wondered why we were painstakingly taught to set tables like that in debutante class (yes, that’s really still a thing among upper/upper-middle class Southern high school girls)

What's a blunt fork? It would be incredibly easy to kill someone with any ordinary metal fork.

I think OP's phrase structure was likely:

   [[blunt knives] and forks]

rather than

   [blunt [knives and forks]]

A modern eating fork is a blunt fork. An older fork wasn't really a tool for eating from, but was really more like one of the large meat forks one uses to carve a turkey or otherwise hold meat. The tines were longer and there were often fewer of them. On top of this, they were sharpened to a point.

The difference is more like the difference between a sharp kitchen or steak knife and a dulled butter knife (even if it has a point). Sure, you can kill someone with the dull butter knife, if it doesn't bend and you hit the right spots, but it is going to be more difficult than the proper knife.

A knife can easily lethally wound someone before they can react, and before people nearby can help.

Are you trying to argue with the idea that forks are safer than knives?

Like yeah you can kill someone with a push-pin or a howitzer, but what's your point?

Any modern fork, essentially. The tips are flat or rounded, never pointy. While it might be possible to kill someone with it, given enough training and/or determination, I don't think it would fall into "incredibly easy".

> It would be incredibly easy to kill someone with any ordinary metal fork

Only in the movies, unless you use a grill or pitch fork.

I don't know about incredibly easy, but certainly possible. If you stab somebody in the chest with a fork, it won't penetrate as deeply as a dagger, and there's a higher probability that the ribcage will stop the blow and spare the internal organs. Forks are less-lethal utensils.

Sure, but the chest is the worst possible place to attempt to stab someone. It's full of ribs.

Stab them in the head, or the neck, or the gut.

Not nearly as easy as it would be to kill with a sharp knife. A fork only has so much travel and would have a hard time penetrating tough tissues such as the epicardium. Besides, people don't seem to stay still when being killed, would you? So maybe not so easy to kill with a fork.

You don't have to stab someone in the heart to kill them. You can definitely nick the femoral artery or damage the windpipe/jugular with a fork. Dead in minutes.

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