We all walk with little rocks in our shoes that twinge our soles and stop us short, cause us to pause a mere shaving of an inch and sliver of a minute before our goal, to leave the last fraction of a dram in our glass. We suffer with our little rocks and are impatient with others for theirs, and yet we despise those who lack them.
Those rocks are, literally and literarily, scruples: from Latin scrupulus, diminutive of scrupus, ‘rough or sharp stone’ – a word that shares a Proto-Indo-European root with short and curt. Scrupus was also, figuratively, ‘anxiety’, and so a scrupulus, a sharp little pebble, was a misgiving – and we call those who are free of such misgivings unscrupulous.
Ah, but how we long to take off the shoe and fling the pebble away! To make a scene as described by Rachel Wetzsteon in “After Eden”:
and when one too many led
to wise judgements too few, “I’m trying
to break up with you!” he shouted as
stockings and scruples flew
And how we dread and resent scruples, and see them as so much more and less and other than a simple hard little piece of earth, like Anna Lætitia Barbauld in “To Mr. [S.T.] C[oleridge]”:
Scruples here,
With filmy net, most like the autumnal webs
Of floating gossamer, arrest the foot
Of generous enterprise; and palsy hope
And fair ambition with the chilling touch
Of sickly hesitation and blank fear.
And how we are impatient with those who demur and “make scruples,” and how we, like Countess of Winchilsea Anne Finch in “The Spleen,” have distaste for those who inflict them on others:
By thee Religion, all we know,
That should enlighten here below,
Is veiled in darkness, and perplexed
With anxious doubts, with endless scruples vexed,
And some restraint implied from each perverted text.
And how we know that however much ground there may be to a scruple, it is too nice – and not nice enough – a distinction, too much discretion and not enough valor; like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we scorn
some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward
But how, too, we know that loss of scruples can lead us astray, and not always in ways we will enjoy remembering. Edgar Allan Poe’s victory over scruples in “To — — –. Ulalume: A Ballad” leads to a baleful discovery (and I don’t just mean his rhyme scheme):
Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom—
And conquered her scruples and gloom:
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb—
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said—“What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?”
She replied—“Ulalume—Ulalume—
’Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!”
And yet scruples are such little things. It’s not merely that a scruple is a short sharp shock in our sock, a tiny pointed pebble. It’s that scruple also, on the basis of littleness, names (or has in past times named) small units of measurement: a third of a dram (and thus a twenty-fourth of an ounce), a sixtieth of an arc degree, an eighteenth of a minute, a twelfth of an inch.
So a scruple is to an inch as an inch is to a foot, but a scruple is to a foot an intolerable impediment, not to be stood for or on. To make scruples is to argue on the finest little points, but the finest little point of a scruple in your shoe is simply not to be argued with. And yet there must be some point to having scruples, for when unscrupulousness is afoot it simply cannot be allowed to stand.
Sesquiotica 