A jeweler appraises a ring, 1960. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
I recently proposed to my girlfriend, and so I spent much of the past few years thinking about engagement rings. In Western culture, at least, the ring has taken on such symbolic significance that we casually and almost exclusively refer to a part of the human body in relation to its function as ring carrier the one true purpose of the
digitus quartus. Spend enough time shopping for engagement rings and one might come to believe that every aspect of a person’s being exists only to honor the extra-human perfection that is the ring. But spend some time in