“What’s a gom jabbar?”

I had not noted until just now that Paul’s question to his mother, “What’s a gom jabbar?”, is the first what-is question asked in the Dune series.  Given that Paul raises the possibility of a human gom jabbar shortly thereafter, his later emphasis on the problem of the production of human beings as weapons, the apparent existence of a cluster of concepts around “tooth,” and the extensive exploration of offenses and defenses in the Dune series, I’m inclined to take as a working assumption that Frank Herbert makes Paul raise the question, “What is a weapon?”, in a way that may make the question fresh for Herbert’s readers.

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