The Words: Body Parts

It’s nice to have a body of knowledge—and comforting too. To be conversant with the in and outs of just about anything and to have a deep kinship with it, whether it’s arcane like numismatics, philately or fly fishing or something more global like the history of SALT  creates a kind of confidence. At least in one area of the barnyard you’re not walking around like chicken with its head cut off. It’s also nice to have a good body, but that’s something like horticulture, a discipline burdened with a built-on ephemerality. Bodies like flower petals wilt. The body politic is another matter since humans are migratory animals and the decline of one demographic leads to the rise of another. Body Double was the l984 Brian De Palma film that was a homage to many such Hitchcock classics as Rear Window and Vertigo. But the theme of the double has its own venerable history going back to a novella by Dostoevsky that was eventually appropriated by Borges in "The Other." Of course it’s always a habeas corpus matter since you have to have a body to make a case. Body parts are what eventually leads investigators to missing persons, although you might find them in the kind of garage you go to when your old Impala needs some body work. Calling a crash, "a fender bender" is an example of synecdoche since it employs the part for the whole.