ABSTRACT
Perils of redescription A story from a junior school primer of the early 1980s has locked itself unreliably into my memory in the following form: a wise old man interrupts his journey when he sees a boy stub his toe on a small boulder lying on the thoroughfare, hears the boy malign the person who caused the boulder to be there as an obstruction, and then continues with his journey. Hiding behind a tree, the old man waits to observe how other passers-by react to the boulder lying in their path. A second child comes along and, as with the first, almost trips over the boulder, utters a few choice words at the offending boulder, and, cursing his luck, walks off into the distance. A third child appears, and like the two boys before her, she virtually stumbles over the boulder. Unlike them, however, and speaking out loud to no-one in particular, she fears that the boulder might do an injury to some other passer-by, and so she acts to shove the boulder out of harm’s way. At this point, our hidden observer, who had been bemoaning the lack of moral conscience of the first two children, comes from behind the tree to praise the girl for her sense of social responsibility.
