Every once in a while my eight-year-old daughter comes up to me when I'm working and puts her arm around me in a transparently insincere display of affection, then walks away giggling. As soon as she's gone, I pat my hand around on my back to find a Post-it that says something like “I'm a knucklehead.” You'd think that pronoun /wouldn't mean anything if I didn't put it there myself, but somehow I'm implicit in the utterance. She has visited a small indignity on me, and we both know it.

This is about the most powerful magic you can work with writing, putting a first-person pronoun into somebody else's mouth. It was probably no more than a couple of weeks after the invention of cuneiform in Sumer five millennia ago that some scribe had the idea of pressing the characters for “Kick me” into a clay tablet and fastening it to the back of the robes of a passing priest.