Karphos (κάρφος) refers to a tiny dry particle — a speck of sawdust, a straw, or a tiny splinter. It appears in Jesus' famous teaching on judgment in Matthew 7:3–5 and Luke 6:41–42: 'Why do you look at the karphos in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?' The contrast between the tiny speck and the massive beam (dokos) is one of Jesus' most vivid rhetorical constructions.
The karphos/dokos pair (speck/plank) is a hyperbolic illustration of self-deception in judgment. Those who rush to correct others' minor faults while blind to their own massive failures are engaging in the most dangerous form of hypocrisy — spiritual criticism without self-examination. Jesus does not forbid correction but requires prior self-scrutiny. Remove the beam first; then your vision will be clear enough to help.
The karphos/dokos contrast (speck vs. beam) is absurdist humor in the rabbinical tradition — picture a person with a massive log sticking out of their eye trying to perform eye surgery on someone with a tiny fleck. The absurdity is the point: our self-blindness is massive; our criticism of others focuses on the microscopic. The remedy is not silence but ordered humility — first the beam, then the speck.