“Perhaps [the] most accurate metaphor for this war occurs whenever the news runs a feed from an Arabic language station. Our crawl runs in one direction; theirs runs in the other. You almost expect the crawls to twine like DNA and start fighting – and in that case, the English language would lose. Arabic is so spiky. However lovely the poetic sentiments might be, it still looks like knives and swords to me.” James Lileks ponders the media-saturated war coverage. —Lileks Introduces Orality and Literacy Theory to the Battlefield:Bleats)

Via All But Dissertation, from whence comes the title.