Friday, August 14, 2009

You never know

New words: I was editing a book about ancient Egypt, and I came across the word bustards. It sounded a bit like bastards, so I looked it up. Turns out that it's a type of bird.
Bustards, including floricans and korhaans, are large terrestrial birds mainly associated with dry open country and steppes in the Old World. They make up the family Otididae (formerly known as Otidae). They were renowned by the ancient Arabs for being unusually stupid.

More from the same book: I just found the term freshets of sweat. I looked up freshet and found this:
The term freshet is most commonly used to describe a spring thaw resulting from snow and ice melt in rivers located in the northern latitudes of North America, particularly Canada, where rivers are frozen each winter and thaw during the spring.

That makes me wonder if freshet fits here.


Contact: I can be reached at tgilli52@gmail.com or nc3022@yahoo.com. Also, my Twitter handle is EDITORatWORK.

Entries from The Dog Blog
Blog entries from The Auto Racing Journal
(a book of great stories about the Intimidator)
(the book of great NASCAR stories)

More blog entries by Tom Gillispie

Anecdotes by Tom Gillispie

No comments:

Post a Comment