Sometimes it’s the small thing. The seemingly irrelevant detail in a snatch of familiar idiomatic speech: “I wanted to always play it down.” The word play associated most commonly with childhood, creativity, music, and pleasure being put to such sinister use. The word play in the context of ventilators and mortality rates. To hear that word stained by a cruel and ugly mouth feels nearly as enraging as the larger catastrophe. But that’s the way it is sometimes with small things—they’re really not as small as you thought.