Excerpt from "Cleaving" by Julie Powell

Because there are some things that I just can’t put any more succinctly:  

            “You know, I was thinking,” Colin muses, as his thick fingers performs the delicate knotwork.  “I think every time I read the word butchery from now on, it’s going to piss me off.”

            “How so?”
            “Well, you know, I read a lot of history.  You know, military history.  And I’ll come across sentences about ‘butchery on the battlefield,’ like butchery means something is bloody and messy and, I don’t know, unskilled.  And it offends me a little, frankly.  Because butchery is just the opposite of that.”
            —Cleaving, by Julie Powell (2009)