Last Friday, Sarah used “Touchstone” as a metaphor. I think she uses the metaphor, you touch a stone and see her landscape in time, in a way that is poetically decentralized from the usual meaning of Touchstone. Which is something solid, based and reliable and that is the way I have used “touchstone”, because I have long -standing problems around the base and reliability. A touchstone is what you mean when you have become uncertain; It is a reliable certainty, isn’t it a truth in which you can believe and for which everything can be judged?
But touch stones did not start as metaphors, they are real things, originally dark and fine grain rocks, such as Slate. They are used as test for the type and purity of a metal. Specifically, gold, how are you paying for gold here, is it really gold? Is it pure or has it cut with lower metals? Draw a line, called the roll, on the touchstone with a piece of the metal, then look at the color of the line. If the streak is gold, the metal is gold and the gold is pure. If the streak is black, it is pyritesilly gold. If the streak is white, it is silver; Copper copper, it’s copper. The more copper faint with gold, the red the streak. Silver and copper alloys, silver, copper and gold; and tin and lead, everyone has His own stripes.
Obviously, knowing which streak means what metal experience, comparison samples and a fine eye. But given that, the test is Quite precise. The Greeks used touch stones. The first medieval Europeans of the northern Europeans liked their touch stones so much that they were buried with them. The touch stones of geologists these days tend not to be a blackboard, but porcelain and their most complicated tests, but they still used “Streak” to identify minerals; Sulfur is yellow.
And now, when many of our politicians and too many media and most of our general fellow citizens are so delighted with misinformation and misinformation, in addition to flat lies, wouldn’t a civic touchstone be pleasant? A truth with which we can count? Is that real? What can we all see and agree? Ok, that will not happen.
Then limit the touchstone to our own separate sweet beings. I like when science provides a metaphor that resonates with ordinary meanings and enriches the world. And I would not like a touchstone, a mark, a streak for which I know what is credible and safe? And oh God, not everyone wants certainty? Something right and always there? Don’t we want that as much as we want food and water and do not burn our houses? Surely we do it.
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Touchstone courtesy of Science Museum GroupCC BY-C-SA 4.0 license
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