NO! That Is Not A Typo
O noes! It's an hilarious pun, hilarious I tell you, laugh or it's the Remote Nuclear Tormentor for you. Art!
You have been warned
Today the Intro will very probably take up the whole of the blog, as we are, once again, going to visit Arnie and Gardenia Schickelbaum in pursuit of using and defining a whole host of ridiculously obscure or foreign words that have appeared as solutions in oodles of Codewords as solutions. Arnie, as you ought to remember, is a veeblefetzer repairman, whom had made an enormous amount doing repair work on one of the moons of Jupiter. His wife, Gardenia, had been left alone for a year and a half and resorted to various - ah - occupations to pass the time. Once returned, Arnie could afford to indulge in wildly expensive hobbies, such as hunting wildlife. Art!
ELAND: 'A large, spiral-horned antelope (Tacrotragus Oryx) living on East and South African bushland. Possesses a dewlap and hump, of a light brown colouration with vertical white stripes. From Dutch to Afrikaans meaning 'Elk'. Arnie only shot them with a camera, principally as nobody would trust him with a gun. Art!
Another, rather different, iteration
Art!
Whilst Arnie pursued photo opportunities in Africa, Gardenia hunted the above in South America, as she spoke better Spanish than Swahili.
AGOUTI: Via Spanish, from Guarani. Any hystricomorph rodent of the genus Dasyprocta, of Central and South America. Agoutis are agile and long-legged, with hooflike claws and are valued for their meat. Which you can bet Gardenia dined upon, airfare and hotels costing what they do. Where did she consume grilled agouti? O I thought you'd never ask - Art!
EATERY: A casual location for informal dining, such as a café, diner or food truck. Origin circa 1901 from South Canada, derivation obscure. Gardenia, long used to bland food from New York's dining establishments, found that the cuisine in Bahia, her agouti hunting-ground, made liberal use of the fiery malagueta pepper. She desired a digestive system composed of - Art!
ASBESTOS: Any of the fibrous amphibole and serpentine minerals, especially chrysotile and tremolite, that are incombustible and resistant to chemicals. Via Latin and Greek, from 'Asbestos', meaning 'inextinguishable'. Perhaps a drink of milk instead of dodgy chemicals?
Why did I emphasise the word 'and' in the item above? O I thought you'd never ask!
AMPERSAND: The character '&', meaning - you may be ahead of me here - 'and'. It is derived from the phrase 'And per se and', which means 'the symbol & itself represents "and"'. The symbol itself is an adaptation of the Latin for 'and', that being 'et'. Conrad is unsure of the etiquette of using an ampersand instead of the word 'and', besides which both count as a single word for Word Count totals. Art!
Conrad unsure what the car's for
There was a bit of social media pushback about Gardenia's hunting and eating activities, which she had been rather insulated from as the wife of a multi-millionaire, at least as long as she was in Brazil or Peru - where they also have very hot quisine - but things got equally as hot for her when she returned to the Big Apple. Arnie missed all this, he was happily sipping gins in various Low Country bars at this point. Art!
SLOE: Small, sour blue-black fruits of the blackthorn bush, derived from the Old English 'Slah'. The Dutch and Belgians invented gin, for which Conrad is profoundly grateful, but it was the British whom added sloes and sugar to make sloe gin.
Just to continue, the sloe is pretty indigestible uncooked, as it's naturally very acidic and bitter. Once cooked, it's a lot more amenable to being et, including being used in jams and cordials.
HOWEVER- Art!
HANDFUL OF DEATH!
The pit of a sloe berry contains a cyanide derivative, which the metabolism of Hom. Sap. processes into hydrogen cyanide. Yes, that hydrogen cyanide, the chemical compound that kills people. You'd have to chew a lot of the stones to make yourself dangerously ill, mind. But people can be stupid.
Back to Gardenia as her husband drinks his way around Amsterdam and Liege. You may call her agouti-slaying steak dinners short-sighted or -
PURBLIND: Partly or nearly blind, lacking in insight or understanding or obtuse. From the Old English 'Pure blind'. Art!
Madam, those are for sleeping in
"If they have no bread, let them eat cake" - a phrase notably NOT quoted by Marie-Antoinette - is probably the acme of being purblind. If a starving peasantry cannot afford bread, how on earth are they going to afford the much more expensive alternative of cake? Not to mention that it's a lot more fattening, what with all the butter and sugar present. Art!
DO NOT TAUNT THE DIABETIC WITH CAKE! JUST DON'T!
Arnie, picking up on social media that people were being hostile to Gardenia, flew back home to provide moral support to his wife, arriving at JFK and transiting the TWA Flight Centre as he left the airport. Art!
The apse-like TWA Flight Centre
APSE: A domed or vaulted semi-circular or polygonal recess, especially at the east end of a church. The TWA Flight Centre is most certainly not a church or cathedral, yet it does exhibit certain similar architectural qualities, which is why it's here.
Arnie, ever one to think outside the box, had a proposition for Gardenia. Given their - or, rather, his - fortune, they could both undergo mitigation surgery that would allow them to survive on the surface of -
Mercury!
Where they could help carry out the sun-harvesting project to accrue solar power for onward transmission to Earth, which paid ten times what he'd earned out in the orbit of Saturn*. Art!
"I don't know," replied Gardenia. "It seems a bit extreme. Almost as if an author was - kinda - over-reaching for a solution."
"It'll be fine," said Arnie, so she agreed to become a -
CYBORG: A blend of 'Cybernetic' and 'Organism'. A fictional creature that is part human (or animal) and part machine. Art!
Cyborgs tend to be unemotional - it says here in 'Brewer's' - and/or violently destructive. They give examples of the Terminator, which is absolutely on point, Pris, from 'Blade Runner', which is completely wrong, and the 'Borg' in 'Starry Trex', which I will give them. One particular adaptation they needed was their -
LARYNXES: The singular is a cartilaginous and hollow muscular organ, forming part of the air passage to the lungs. In higher vertebrates it contains the vocal chords. From the Greek 'Larynx' meaning 'Throat'. There's practically no atmosphere on Mercury, so sounds won't travel by vibration in the air, meaning the larynx needs to be altered to transmit a radio signal. Art!
OXYGEN: A colourless, odourless, highly reactive gaseous element, the most common element in the Earth's surface but totally lacking on Mercury, so Arnie and Gardenia are going to have to get used to tanked air supplies. Symbol 'O' -
Which is where we came in and a good point to call a halt, as indeed the whole blog has been this Intro. Back to normal tomorrow. I bet you can hardly wait.
* Or Jupiter. I can't remember which**.
** Nor can I be bothered to check.
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