The word kill

It was decades ago: I remember how impressed I was when someone told me that the word kill, in Sanskrit, meant mother. It is logical and nothing short of obvious; all our words for progenitor have that root:

,

,

,

,

,

,

, and so on. The curious thing, if anything, is how that sound, in our language, also became the opposite: from someone who gives you life to the act of taking it away.

They say our word kill comes from

, which in Latin meant “to sacrifice an animal to some boring god.” And from the animal it passed to the person, like the verb to catch: we Argentines adopted, to say fornicate, the word that the Spanish only used to talk about animal fornications. In Castile the sows and pigs fuck but not the ladies and gentlemen; In Spanish, those who kill do to a man what they previously did to beasts.

(A few days ago, in a suburb of Buenos Aires, a woman entered a butcher shop with her Labrador dog, a certain

, and asked how much it would cost to have him slaughtered. To slaughter him?, the butcher asked her anxiously. Yes, let him do it. Peel and cut it and give me the chopped meat, the lady explained; it's a little old, in a year or two we won't be able to eat it. The butcher was still surprised, the lady told him that was what he did. all the time and that's what animals are in the field for. Someone, as always happens now, filmed it and the scandal grew like wildfire in the most carnivorous country in the world.)

The lady did not calibrate well: now killing has become more difficult. There were times when it was very common, things in life. And I'm not just talking about chickens or rabbits, which most of them had killed at some point; I say people. In the European Middle Ages the average homicide rate was 100 per 100,000 people per year: 50 times more than today on the same continent. And when they caught them they punished them with death. A century ago, every country in the world executed criminals—sometimes for crimes such as homosexuality or stealing bread or writing a pamphlet. For much of history, almost all men were armed. In Europe, the rich—the knights—reserved the right to carry weapons—their swords—so the poor carried their knives, daggers, and other hidden spikes. But now the vast majority of Europeans do not have weapons, we do not use them, we would not know how. That differentiates us from the United States, which has more guns than people — and from time to time they use them to kill 10 or 20 kids in a shopping center, in a school.

Their justification is savage: they claim the tradition of a land of pioneers, without a State to defend them—or repress them. States were created to dominate people but also so that they did not have to kill each other so much. So in the rest of the world, these States try to assume a monopoly on violence, and citizens are no longer armed or sent to wars for their homelands. Almost no one kills almost no one anymore. I have always been intrigued by the question: what proportion of people in our societies has he killed. One in every 1,000, every 100,000, every 14? Or, put without so many figures: do we know people who killed? Probably not, and less so in Spain: this land, which according to television circuses is a tsunami of violence and blood, is one of the countries in the world with the lowest proportion of violent deaths, 10 times less than the global average.

We don't kill, and we don't know what it's like. That is to say: what effect does the act of killing have on the one who kills? We know, from the outside, by mere observation, that there is an extreme imbalance: the effect on one of the parties is evident and absolute, on the other it is elusive.

Killing is no longer part of our lives and, at the same time, movies and television show us so many people killing—so many people killed—that we normalize it. (The same as so many fucking or fucking: things that almost no one saw have almost never become a common spectacle.) We see deaths: series or movies that do not have any are rare, and we also see them on the streets, live and indirect: With the proliferation of smart phones and surveillance cameras, any violent death in any corner of the world is likely to become

or other tangled candy. Thus, it seems as if there were so many more—and there are so many less. But, after seeing it so much, it is now almost easy for us to assume that killing is something—more or less—normal, that the one who does it continues on his path without major scars. We do it less than ever; we see it more than ever. It is, I suspect, a metaphor for something.

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