Ice pick

[quintopia]

It has come to my attention (by a rather amusing conversation about whether being brained by an ice pick would necessarily cause death in which two differing definitions of ice pick were being used) that this term has a different meaning outside the U.S. than in, yet I could find no mention of this in this lexicon.

As I have come to understand it:

In the U.S., Trotsky was killed by an ice axe. Elsewhere, he was killed by an ice pick.

In the U.S., an ice pick is a sort of stiletto or awl, used to break apart ice when it has frozen into the automatic ice dispenser's catch tray, or to remove frozen condensation from the inside walls of your icebox. See the Wikipedia article on "ice pick" for an image. Such an item is not commonly kept in households outside the U.S.?

I leave it to the good people of this forum to determine if the above is actually true from a British perspective.

[SepticTone]

As we in the UK tend not to have refrigerators which produce ice, as ice in the house is not much use here, we don't have icepicks. Our fridges also tend to auto-defrost-themselves.

It would howver be possible for Trotsky to have been killed by an ice-pick, if his assailant were very very accurate & strong & persistant.

But you're right. It was probably an ice-axe.

[davec]

An ice axe, used by mountaineers to climb snowy/ice mountains, looks quite threatening, and no doubt can be used to cause grievous bodily harm by persons with little or no training.

An ice pick can easily do the job, though... check out the Wikipedia article on 'Lobotomy'. Walter Freeman experimented with an ice pick, shoved up into the eye socket above the eye, and perfected the procedure using a similar surgical instrument known as a leucotome. He turned lobotomy into a mass production procedure, often doing a half dozen or more a day in his visits to mental hospitals.

If your objective is to kill someone, obviously you do not perform the controlled motions involved in a lobotomy, you just shove the pick in and go for it with gusto and abandon.

Or just go for the heart. Actually requires a tad of skill to do in one quick stroke, but not much.

The ice pick has the advantage of being easier to conceal.

Hate to bring this up so late in the conversation, but there is such a thing as a 'pickaxe'....

[SepticTone]

Of course there is a pickaxe.

This is a pickaxe:



Sorry about the image size, but this is a 2.5kg pickaxe, so it's going to be big anyway.