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The Thorn Word (New Yorker)
A rare excitement ran through the _The New Yorker_'_s_ copy department last week when it was discovered that a line of Middle English poetry quoted in a piece by Peter Hessler about standing in police lineups had a thorn in it. Usually a thorn, like a splinter, is something you want to remove, with tweezers, or maybe a sterilized needle, but this thorn was something we wanted desperately to insert. Thorn is an obsolete letter from the Anglo-Saxon alphabet representing the sound we now write as "th": it looks like the letter "p" with the vertical stroke extending above as well as below the protuberance. In fact, a thorn looks pretty much like a thorn, as in one of those prickly things on the stem of a rose. You will not find it on your keyboard unless you are J. R. R. Tolkien. I hadn't seen one since graduate school--which was exactly the context in which Peter Hessler was using it, in a throwaway reference to "Gawain and the Green Knight."
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