It is, of course, the most agonizing injury known. The thought of it makes the strong tremble and the weak pass out. Its brutality can be unbounded—a loose page will suffice. It is the paper cut.

My thoughts went to the cruelest cut when a friend showed me a particularly vicious one she’d received on her fingertip. Most paper cuts I’d seen or suffered were straight slices less than a centimeter across. Hers was at least twice the normal length and zagged in the middle, as if some invisible assailant decided to twist a miniature knife. In the midst of my horror, I wondered what modern medicine has to say about the paper cut.

Surprisingly little, I discovered. Studies mentioning paper cuts that I found in medical journals were almost uniformly concerned with the possibility of infection, especially by the superscary methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bug, aka MRSA. A few sources noted that a hemophiliac will not in fact bleed to death from a paper cut, thereby dispelling a piece of playground wisdom widely disseminated among the community of eight-year-old amateur hematologists.

An irony of paper cuts, contends the Wisegeek Web site, is that they are more likely to occur when the paper is high quality. “When glossy sheets of paper are cut very thin, they are uniquely good at causing paper cuts,” the site explains. Grab a ream of tightly bound paper with one interior sheet protruding slightly, and you have a serious weapon on your soon-to-be-bloody hands. “The other papers hold the dislocated paper in position, giving it enough stiffness to cut like a razor’s edge,” Wisegeek says. Which is why there may be a trail of blood leading from the office copier to the desk of whatever unfortunate soul did the good deed of filling up an empty paper tray.

Paper cuts do indeed bring on outsize pain. Fingertips, the most likely site of damage, are loaded with the nerve endings—including the pain-interpreting nociceptors—necessary for the constant exploration of the environment. Take a gander at a cortical homunculus, a representation of how much of the brain is devoted to dealing with signals from individual body parts: I can’t hold a basketball with one hand, but my homunculus could palm a beach ball. So a tiny tip rip gets a disproportionate number of nociceptors, none of which knows the difference between a vacation brochure and a samurai sword.

The fear of a specific kind of paper cut overwhelms me whenever I’m about to send snail mail. In the movie Swimming with Sharks, the cowering assistant to misanthropic film executive Kevin Spacey reaches his breaking point. He ties up the exec and administers facial slices with the edge of an office envelope. Watching this scene instilled such terror that I changed my conventional east-west style of envelope licking, for fear of a tongue slash, to a series of north-south dabs.

The homunculus’s crazy-big tongue supports my decision. It also shows why another fictional entertainment industry giant, Alec Baldwin’s 30 Rock kingpin Jack Donaghy, was probably wasting his time when he took lessons on “how to avoid getting paper cuts while making love in a pile of money.” The legs and torso together take up less brain space than the tongue or fingers.

Also, Benjamins are soft. And soft paper is safer. Wisegeek points out that “newspaper may be the least likely to inflict a paper cut.” I can offer anecdotal evidence in support of that claim. In my first job in journalism—as a paper boy delivering thousands of copies of the New York Post—I did not receive a single paper cut. Then again, the last time the Post contained anything sharp it was still being edited by William Cullen Bryant.

Editors’ note: While opening reader mail just five hours after filing this column, Mirsky suffered a nasty paper cut.

This article was published in print as "The Unkindest Cut."

9 Comments

1. 1. Kaslo 12:42 AM 2/18/12

   Steve, I have a cure for paper cuts. I make a salve with comfrey and other plants that's amazing. Just put some on the cut and cover with a bandaid or a bit of kleenex and a piece of tape. The pain will disappear; if you leave it alone for a day or two it will be healed. I give it away, so if you give me your mailing address I'll send some.
   marilyn_lee_r@hotmail.com

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2. 2. gabaum 04:52 PM 2/20/12

   Paper is actually a very interesting material composed of wood pulp fibers that bond together naturally (hydrogen bonds) when formed from a polar solvent (water). One of paper's unique attributes is that it has a very high bending stiffness (which is why it nicely goes through a printer but also might cut through flesh). But this stiffness depends on the type of fiber used, the method of separating the fibers from the wood (pulping, the manufacturing process, and the moisture content. Most papers are also orthotropic, having different properties in different directions. This is easy to demonstrate in your office. Take a piece of your office paper and cut it into a square taking care not to crease or fold it. Let it hang over the edge of your desk by some measured amount and notice the deflection, then rotate it 90 degrees and measure the deflection. The direction of least deflection is the machine direction (or direction of manufacture) of the paper. This direction, as a result of the fluid forces applied during manufacture, has more fibers aligned parallel to it. This edge will more easily cut your finger than the direction perpendicular to it.
   
   I could go on into more detail and discuss softness, etc., but I suspect you are getting bored by now. But, as I said earlier, paper is a very interesting material.

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3. 3. suitti 02:39 PM 2/22/12

   I feel your pain.
   
   In a somewhat related concept, the most generally feared medical procedure is bandaid removal.
   

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4. 4. dbtinc 08:28 AM 3/1/12

   Bandaid removal? No, try a brazilian wax job at the bikini line ... for men.

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5. 5. Not 'Tarded in reply to dbtinc 09:56 AM 3/1/12

   How is a bikini wax a "medical procedure"?
   Twit.

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6. 6. lamorpa in reply to Kaslo 10:23 AM 3/1/12

   "a salve with comfrey and other plants that's amazing"?
   
   I'm sure that's fun, but you could just use the bandaid and save a lot of time (and emailing).

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7. 7. the Gaul 11:15 AM 3/1/12

   Must take issue with the author's envelope-licking. East-west or west-east works, but does, on occasion, deliver tongue cuts. However, north-south simply does not work - unless frustration is your goal.

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8. 8. toffer99 11:58 AM 3/1/12

   I was enjoying it, but hadn't noticed the author of this piece, as you don't. Then I saw "the last time the Post contained anything sharp..." and I thought "a Steve Mirsky joke".
   Always good writing, jokes or not. Thanks Mr. M.

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9. 9. Steve3 07:32 PM 3/2/12

   I dare you to send your home address to marilyn_lee_r . All s/he wants to do is send you something in the mail.

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