![]() ![]() If there’s a more powerful political parable in the last 50 years I have not read it. When the truck’s splenetic driver is lured into a roadside bar and a lengthy conversation about his virility, the hiding men face a terrible choice: to maintain their silence and maybe survive, or make noise to alert people to their struggle and possibly get caught, if not killed. Ghassan Kanafani’s slim modernist novel chronicles the lives of three Palestinian men trying to sneak into Kuwait by hiding in the back of an empty tanker truck. ![]() Dragons rule! –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor Also, Michael Swanwick wrote this book because he thought that Anne McCaffrey was making dragons too cuddly, and he wanted to evoke dragons as figures of terror, which is the best reason to write a fantasy novel ever. Jemisin will adore this crazed take on classic folk horror tropes. The Norman-French etymology of curfew (couvre-feu) is too well known to require comment.įans of Philip K. That sharp little brightness, as of a window-pane flashing just after sunset, which belongs to the ancient, technical language of heraldry, such as argent, azure, gules, … sometimes seems to have spread to more common Norman words- banner, hauberk, lance, pennon, … and-in the right mood-we can even catch a gleam of it in everyday terms like arms, assault, battle, fortress, harness, siege, standard, tower, and war. Perhaps this is especially true of the military vocabulary. Many of these early Norman words seem to have a distinctive character of their own, and even now, after nearly a thousand years, they will sometimes stand out from the printed page with peculiar appeal. Sadly, I do not have a copy with me, but was able to find some random sections on the internet: Barfield, a philosopher/philologist by training, takes an amiable, conversational approach to etymology, and works slowly through the way localized, specific terminology makes its metaphorical journey into wider usage. First published in 1953, History in English Words was billed as a “historical excursion through the English language” but to me it felt more like spending time with a distant old relative whose immense knowledge of words and their origins was always unspooling, regardless of audience.
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