Inpidginous Vocab B
Do you find yourself lapsing into pidgin from time to time? God knows how long we've been here, trying to eat from the tree of knowledge and then falling from grace or from the Anglosphere. It may be time to consider a bit of a vocab overhaul and on the other hand some revision too.So take a B line...
revision:
BILL LAWRY Bottle opener or corkscrew (named after Australian cricket opener (opening bat)): Anyone got a Bill Lawry for the vino?
BLUE ARSED FLY To act in a hectic manner: I've been running around like a blue arsed fly.
BREAD AND DUCK UNDER THE TABLE all that was available to eat was bread: We would ask "What's for tea?" and dad would answer "Bread and duck under the table."
new words:
BAGONIZE verb. To wait anxiously for your suitcase to appear on the airport baggage carousel.
BAR-CODE HAIRSTYLE n. A style in which a man's last few strands of hair are combed across the top of his head, thus resembling a bar-code pattern
BOBO (BOH.boh) n. A person who combines affluence and a successful career with a preference for countercultural ideas and artifacts. Example Citation:
"Bobos talk like hippies but walk like yuppies, decrying materialism while indulging in all manner of luxuries."—Victoria Loe Hicks, "Vision of the future," The Dallas Morning News, March 19, 2001
hybrid:
BOOMERANG
1.A flat, curved, usually wooden missile configured so that when hurled it returns to the thrower.
2.A statement or course of action that backfires
Boomerangs developed as a refinement of carved throwing sticks (kylies) that were used as weapons, primarily for hunting. The oldest kylie found to date is one formed from a mammoth tusk. Discovered in Poland in 1987, its age has been carbondated at about 20,300 years. There is some evidence that boomerangs were developed in several cultural groups. For example, a boomerang-shaped object found in Germany was made of ash wood. Carbon-dated to an age of 2,400-2,800 years, it is preserved enough to allow archaeologists to reconstruct its entire shape. The replica has been thrown left-handed to produce a complete boomerang trajectory; however, the wing profiles were less than optimal, making it difficult to throw successfully. Evidence suggests that boomerangs may also have been developed in Egypt and India.
The oldest boomerang found in Australia dates to about 14,000 years ago. The origin of the word is uncertain, although it may derive from the cry "boom-my-row" ("return, stick") that British colonizers heard Dharuk tribesmen shout when throwing the instruments in 1788.
Two design components give the boomerang the capability of circular flight. One is the arrangement of the arms, and the other is the airfoil profile shape that allows the arms into wings. During flight, the boomerang spins rapidly (about 10 revolutions per second). The wing profiles create the same lift effect that makes airplanes fly. In addition, the spinning motion creates a gyroscopic precession, which pulls the boomerang into a circular path. A similar effect can be seen with a spinning top: if the top's axis is not quite vertical, the upper portion of the toy travels in a circle around the axis.
A Kylie is one of the Aboriginal words for the hunting stick used in warfare and for hunting animals. Instead of following a curved flight path, it flies in a straight line from the thrower. The word is perhaps an English corruption of a word meaning boomerang taken from one of the Western Desert languages, for example, the Warlpiri word karli.
No comments:
Post a Comment