Ditto Visual Purple. Read it hundreds of times, never heard it spoken aloud.
I always assumed it to mean “as obvious as a ten-foot-pole”, not “as unadorned as a simple wooden rod.”
And Mr. Excellent: Not that crazy of them to use pikes. I’m referring to Dave Grossman’s book On Killing for the second time today, but there’s excellent evidence that, until after WWII, only 15% of soldiers in combat ever even fired their weapons at enemy soldiers. The rest simply had not been adequately conditioned to overcome the inborn prohibition against killing another human being.
Post-battlefield reviews of dropped muskets during the Civil War reveal many instances of muskets being loaded with 8 or 10 or more subsequent, unfired rounds. The likely conclusion is that the men would load their weapons (a highly visible act that they couldn’t avoid doing in front of their fellow soldiers), pretend to fire, and then load their next round right on top of the last one.
Similarly, modern tests of Revolutionary-era muskets show that they were NOT the horribly inaccurate weapons we make them out to be: One could have good confidence of hitting somebody on the other line when firing. The conclusion, therefore, is that most Revolutionary-era soldiers likely took the psychologically easy way out and either didn’t fire or intentionally fired over the heads of their foes.
One major reason the Redcoats were so feared was that they were quite good at not breaking formation, even under fire, and were well-practiced in the use of the bayonet–i.e., using the musket as a pike. A large number of battles from this era essentially turned into pike battles once the troops closed in enough.
So getting back to the original point, a pike was NOT a crazy idea, even as late as the Civil War. (Of course, people still have a lot of difficulty with sticking a pike through another human being, but the psychological impact of that impending impalement is so strong on the potential victim–stronger, apparently, than the fear of merely being shot–that few opponents can keep from running away in sheer terror.)