It was a regal gesture, like being tapped on the shoulder with a sword.
(Rushdie recalls that the Queen, after tapping him on the shoulder with the sword of honour, asked: "Are you still writing books?") But then Her Majesty – or rather, Tony Blair through her – had also knighted that same Sacranie two years earlier.
He cannot call himself "Sir Rudy" and he will not be tapped on the shoulder with a sword -- the British simply do not do to Americans what they do to one another -- but MAYOR RUDOLPH W. GIULIANI is now a knight.
It was this accolade which was the essential act in creating a knight, and a simpler ceremony developed, conferring knighthood merely by striking or touching the knight-to-be on the shoulder with a sword, or "dubbing" him, as is still done today.
Did the Queen tap him on the shoulders with a sword?
Mr. Stringer said he knelt before the queen in Buckingham Palace and that she touched each of his shoulders with a sword.
Rhos Tolle, for one, injured his leg too badly in the previous day's unhorsing to continue, and a member of the Knights of Valour dislocated his shoulder in a sword-fighting demonstration for a school group.
One 22-year-old soldier, who was holding a freshly dry-cleaned uniform with a Special Forces shoulder patch, of a sword with three lightning bolts through it, looked ashen.
THE image of a fierce woman, wearing the American flag around her shoulders and carrying a sword and shield, greets visitors to an exhibition at the Cold Spring Harbor Library and Environmental Center.
And the man who was going to slip the sword between the shoulder blades was Unai Emery, Valencia's former manager, a man with a score to settle after he was sacked following three consecutive years of finishing third.
In the spring of 2012, more than a month into the climbing season, he became increasingly worried about a bulge of glacial ice three hundred yards wide that was frozen tenuously to Everest's West Shoulder, hanging like a massive sword of Damocles directly over the main route up the Nepal side of the mountain.
