Two things
- Useful is relative. When I am trying to dodge the secret police/UKIP militias or barter for a tin of food five or ten years hence, none of this below will be ‘useful’…
- Shouldn’t I be writing my bloody thesis, or book or whatever?
Not everything that I had to look up makes the cut. That would be boring. My selection criteria? They shift.
Saturday 28 November 2016
Tsuris – www.thefreedictionary.com/tsuris Informal Trouble; aggravation. n grief or strife n.
Sotadic Sotades was the chief representative of the writers of obscene and even pederastic satirical poems, called Kinaidoi, composed in the Ionic dialect and in the metre named after him. The sotadic metre or sotadic verse, which has been classified by ancient and modern scholars as a form of ionic metre, is one that reads backwards and forwards the same, as “llewd did I live, and evil I did dwell.” These verses have also been called palindromic. Sotades was also the author of some of the first recorded palindromes, and many credit him with the invention of that particular genre of composition. One of his poems attacked Ptolemy‘s marriage to his own sister Arsinoe, from which came the infamous line: “You’re sticking your prick in an unholy hole.”[1] For this, Sotades was imprisoned, but he escaped to the island of Caunus, where he was afterwards captured by Patroclus, Ptolemy’s admiral, shut up in a leaden chest, and thrown into the sea. (Kaunos was a mythological character who fell in love with his sister; Kaunos is the city named after him, in ancient Caria, Anatolia.) British Orientalist and explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) hypothesised the existence of a “Sotadic zone“. He asserted that there exists a geographic zone in which pederasty, i.e. romantic-sexual intimacy between a boy and a man, is prevalent and celebrated among the indigenous inhabitants,[2] and named it after Sotades.
soc, the historical right of holding a local court.
mantissa Mathematics the part of a logarithm after the decimal point.
Saturday 3 December 2016
A retiarius (plural retiarii; literally, “net-man” or “net-fighter” in Latin) was a Roman gladiator who fought with equipment styled on that of a fisherman: a weighted net (rete, hence the name), a three-pointed trident (fuscina or tridens), and a dagger (pugio).
Epigoni The descendants of the seven princes who marched against Thebes: Aegialeus, son of Adrastus; Alcmaeon, son of Amphiaraus; Diomedes, son of Tydeus; Promachus, son of Parthenopaeus; Sthenelus, son of Capaneus; Thersander, son of Polynices; Euryalus, son of Mecisteus. To avenge the slain, they marched against Thebes, under the leadership of Adrastus, ten years after the first Theban war (see ADRASTUS).
Tarantass A low horse-drawn carriage without springs used in Russia, capable of having its wheels replaced with runners during the winter.
Cabretta Soft leather from skins of hairy South American sheep
Nucha The nape is the back of the neck. In technical anatomical/medical terminology, the nape is referred to by the word nucha,
Osielet, a hard substance growing on the inside of a horse’s knee among the small bones.
Tyrosine (Tyr or Y)[1] or 4-hydroxyphenylalanine is one of the 22 amino acids that are used by cells to synthesize proteins. It is a non-essential amino acid with a polar side group. Its codons are UAC and UAU. The word “tyrosine” is from the Greek tyros, meaning cheese, as it was first discovered in 1846 by German chemistJustus von Liebig in the protein casein from cheese.
Steyr is a statutory city, located in the Austrian federal state of Upper Austria. It is the administrative capital, though not part of Steyr-Land District. Steyr is Austria’s 12th most populated town and the 3rd largest town in Upper Austria.
Saturday 10 December 2016
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marchudson.net 