Scissors come with baggage

Either they are the most useful tool on this earth or they are wretched things that do not live up to their promise.

We didn’t have primary scissors - frustrating things - when I was little, which may be why I appreciate them so much and have a pair of scissors in every room of the house... and several at my desk at work.

Mum let me use her scissors – when the baby was napping, of course. I hacked up old catalogues and magazines. Since the scissors were good ones, I quickly developed some skill with them, though when McCall’s Magazine printed Betsy McCall paper dolls, I begged Mum to cut them out for me. Maybe it’s the scissors that connect Betsy McCall and Maggie Muggins in my mind. Remember those wise words of Maggie Muggins? “I always walk when I carry scissors, Mr. McGregor!”

The thing that got me starting pondering scissors was the claim, during a sidewalk conversation, Leonardo da Vinci (1500s) invented scissors. The man added a lot to the whole of human knowledge, not to mention all the inventions he did design, but it seems, according to my research, his contribution to the manufacture of scissors was to describe a type of grinding wheel edged with leather and coated with oil and abrasives which was still used in cutlery-making until the 1960s. Scissors have been in use for more than 3,000 years, though the steel blades we’re familiar with were first manufactured in the 1700s.

The really useful bit of information the scissor research revealed has to do with what features make scissors work. Where the bolt the blades swing on (fulcrum) is placed makes a difference: the further it is from the handles and the closer it is to the material being cut, the more cutting power flows between the blades. Think garden shears or bolt cutters and you’ll know what to look for when you want powerful scissors.

For a right-handed person, the dog-legged thumb blade faces toward the cutter’s body; a left-

handed person would do well to find a pair with a thumb blade which also allows the left thumb to manipulate the top handle and which presents that blade on the side closest to the lefty’s body.

It turns out what makes scissors sharp has more to do with how the scissor (one blade of a pair) is shaped than how sharp the actual edge is. The edge is not ground. It’s the flat side of the scissor that faces between the blades that is hollowed out in a good pair of cutters.

As for the scissors-user, the most effective cut is achieved when the thumb pushes against the thumb blade and the fingers pull the outer blade against the thumb blade. This results in a sort of push-me-pull-you motion, accomplished at the same time as the apart-together motion of scissors in operation. Talk about your fine-motor multitasking!

In the hands of a skilled operator, practical and beautiful!