Obviously it’s actually a serious bit of news, but a nice little crash blossom nonetheless.
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Category: Words
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Man, man, -Man
Just reading Vanity Fair’s, “To See or Not See The Wolfman,” and the last point reminds me of a conversation Al and I used to have back in Brunswick street about how it’s fun to reverse the Superman/postman emphases:
You’re still confused about how to properly append the suffix “man” to a noun to create a superhero/villain name: Should it be two words (Iron Man)? Should it be hyphenated (Spider-Man)? Does writing it out as one word make it look like it should be someone’s last name? If you’re at all like me, these perplexing questions will distract from your viewing experience.
See also: Batman’s batman.
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I before E
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Hear me roar
Members of Panthera are distinguished by morphological features which enable them to roar (link)
Panthera includes Lions, Tigers, Leopards and Jaguars. The name comes from the Greek, pan = all, ther = beast/animal (because they can hunt pretty much what they like!)
The ther root also gives us the words:
- Theropod (beast-foot) – a group of bipedal dinosaurs including most of the nasty/cool ones in Jurassic Park
- Therianthropy (part-man, part beast) – the most well-known example we have is Lycanthropy (Werewolves) but as a term it also includes things like animal-headed Gods, Centaurs and animal spirit guides
- and most curiously Treacle, which comes to us via French and Latin from the Greek word Theriac (pertaining to venomous beasts) and means antidote, a now obselete definition of treacle
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New Colours
Having had to enter the same list of 40 colours 24 times in succession today I have managed to invite some new shades, my personal favourites are:
- Royal Green
- Still Grey
- Fire Fred
- Fuzzy Lemon
- Arctic Shite
- Salmon Punk
If we only sell 14 Halls Hoodies I might actually cry.
Wired has a list of the Top 10 Geekiest Constructed Languages – it’s pretty much what you’d expect (Klingon, Sindarin, Fremen) but I was surprised that Lapine didn’t make the list, especially when Blade’s ‘Vampirese’ did:
An ancient vampire language from the Blade movies. The most noticeable aspect of this language are the glyphs, symbols tattooed on grunts to show their allegiance and drawn in UV ink defining the boundaries of various vampires’ territories. There’s even a vampire holy book written in the language, the Book of Erebus, featured in the first movie.
Do I believe the Book of Erebus was a book actually written in Vampirese? Or were they just sheets of parchment covered in glyphs suspended between glass to:
- Look cool
- Have vampires kicked through them
That aside Blade Runner’s City Speak isn’t one I would’ve thought of but is an inclusion I wholeheartedly agree with.