More random words - it was a very long day at work, but my instrumentation is back on-line! Woo-hoo!
I read Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer over the weekend because my son just finished it last week and was really excited about it ... so here are a few words that we investigated ...
Artemis had seen that look already, just before Juliet had suplexed a particularly impudent pizza boy.
A suplex is an offensive wrestling move where an opponent is lifted into the air and then heaved or rolled so that they are slammed onto the back. Wikipedia has a whole page of variations of the basic suplex. Apparently the term 'suplex' without additional modifiers refers to the vertical suplex where the opponent is picked up, held upside down and then thrown onto the mat. Here ...
--- *** --- *** ---
He separated all the characters and ran comparisons with English, Chinese, Greek, Arabic and with Cyrillic texts, even with Ogham.
Ogham (᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜)
An ancient British and Irish alphabet, consisting of twenty characters formed by parallel strokes on either side of or across a continuous line. Origin: early 18th century: from Irish ogam, connected with Ogma, the name of its mythical inventor.
 |
| Read more about it here http://www.ancientscripts.com/ogham.html |
--- *** --- *** ---
Now from The Irish Game by Matthew Hart I have ...
In its hold they found one thousand Romanian-made Ak-47 assault rifles, some million rounds of ammunition, 430 grenades, twelve RPGs (launchers for rocket-propelled grenades), more than fifty SAM-7 shoulder-fired ground-to-air missiles, assorted flamethrowers and antitank guns, and two tons of Semtex.
We already have plenty of context, but Semtex ?
Semtex is a general-purpose plastic explosive containing RDX (an explosive nitroamine) and PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate) used in commercial blasting, demolition, and in certain military applications. Semtex was popular with terrorists (like the IRA in the book) because it was, until recently, extremely difficult to detect. (Wikipedia has more).
--- *** --- *** ---
But he liked what he'd heard about the young Americans, and when Isabella and Jack showed up he wrapped a silk dressing gown around his baggy smock and, with a pair of spaniels padding at his heels, issued forth from his atelier.
atelier \ˌa-təl-ˈyā\
A workshop or studio, especially one used by an artist or designer.Origin: late 17th century: from French, from Old French astelle 'splinter of wood', from Latin astula.
 |
| From Wikipedia "In the Titian Room, Titian's magnificent painting of Europa (1561–1562) hangs above a piece of pale green silk, which had been cut from one of Isabella Stewart Gardner's gowns designed by Charles Frederick Worth." Um, interesting use of a Worth gown. |
The only one of those words I was familiar with is atelier but I have to admit to seeing a suplex or two while flipping through the channels. Of course, I had no idea what they were called.
ReplyDelete