Echoes of the Inkwell is a series of essays written in the voice and spirit of historical writers, using AI to imagine how they might respond to today’s headlines. The words are generated by AI; the sensibility is drawn, as faithfully as we can manage, from what these writers actually wrote in their own time. Great minds, forgotten pens — history connected to today’s issues.

A Dictionary for the Age of the Shock Glove

by Ambrose Bierce

It has long been my habit, when the newspapers grow too proud of their own vocabulary, to take that vocabulary apart with the same tools a jeweler uses on a fraudulent stone — a loupe, a small knife, and no sentiment whatever. The government of these United States has lately enriched the language considerably, and a dictionary is owed. I offer these entries not as invention but as translation.

RELEASED, adj.

Said of a man who has died in federal custody. As in: “released from ICE custody on July 22,” concerning a gentleman who had, in point of fact, been dead since July 19. The word performs a small resurrection on paper that the coroner declines to perform on the body. It is the most economical lie in the modern lexicon, requiring no further explanation and inviting none.

SUBDUE, v.

To administer an electrical charge to a citizen’s arm or leg, but never — the manufacturer insists — to the head, throat, chest, or groin, and never for longer than fifteen seconds, and never on the elderly or the pregnant or the young, and never, above all, as punishment. One admires the precision of the instructions, the way a man admires the fine print on a coffin he did not order for himself. A device requiring this many prohibitions to avoid becoming an instrument of torture has already answered the question of what it is.

LAW ENFORCEMENT ACTIVITIES, n.

Whatever the Department of Homeland Security is presently doing to a man in Springfield, Ohio, who came to this country by legal invitation and now wears an ankle monitor for the crime of having been believed, once, by a candidate for president, to be eating a neighbor’s dog. The phrase is offered to reporters in place of an answer, and serves its purpose admirably, being long enough to fill a paragraph and empty enough to fill a grave.

WORST OF THE WORST, n. phrase

A category of person invoked to justify a policy, later found on inspection to include newlyweds, engineers awaiting the renewal of a work visa, and men who missed a court date because the docket moved faster than justice ought to. A senator of my acquaintance — Angus King of Maine, a man apparently still capable of astonishment — observed that the stated purpose of ridding communities of such persons looks increasingly like a lie, and that the true purpose is the quiet assembly of a national police force answerable to no one but its patron. I commend him for saying so aloud. Astonishment is a rare and valuable currency in Washington, where most men have long since spent theirs.

UNMARKED CAR, n.

A vehicle without insignia, driven by a man without a name tag, wearing a mask, empowered to take another man from the street. In my own century we called this an abduction and hanged the men responsible, when we could catch them. In this century it is called enforcement, and the men responsible are commended for their diligence at the annual budget hearing.

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I am told, by those who read the papers more assiduously than I care to, that a glove now exists which can deliver a jolt of electricity to a man’s arm within three seconds and is not, its makers insist, to be used as punishment. I confess I do not know what other use a glove of this description could possibly have. A hammer that must not be used for punishment is still, in the end, a hammer. The distinction is not lost on the man wearing the arm.

What strikes me most, in surveying this new dictionary, is not the cruelty of the thing — cruelty is old, and government has practiced it since before there was ink to record the practice — but the fastidiousness of the language built to disguise it. A regime confident in its own righteousness does not need fifteen-second limits and forbidden zones of the body. It simply acts, and lets history call it what it will. The elaborate rulebook accompanying the shock glove is not a sign of restraint. It is a sign that somewhere, in some office with better lighting than the street, a lawyer has already begun drafting the defense.

I have spent a career cataloguing the ways men lie to themselves in order to sleep at night. I did not expect, at this late date, to find the catalogue still growing. But here it is, entry after entry, each one a small coffin with fine print on the lid.

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Editor’s note: This essay draws on reporting from Wired, The Guardian, CNN, the Associated Press, and Senator Angus King’s public statement of August 2026 regarding the deployment of electroshock restraint devices by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and on DHS’s reported handling of the death of detainee Jose Chajon-Raxon at Delaney Hall. The voice is Ambrose Bierce’s; the events are not invented.