![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Expanding My Vocabulary
Oct. 22nd, 2007 12:15 pm
Read a headline today in the dailyrotten about monkeys defenestrating some government official in India. For some reason I've never looked up what 'defenestrate' means - it sounds dirty, though. Or painful. Actually, it sounds like a combination of dirty and painful. And whenever I hear it, Beavis & Butthead start laughing in my head. "Huh huh huh, you said defenestrate, heh heh heh".
All it means, though, is to 'throw someone or something out a window'. Monkeys chased some poor gov'ment guy in India out the window of an upper floor of a gov'ment building. Ouch. It does give this not-so-dirty word a lot of possible applications, though. You could defenestrate a television, for example. Or defenestrate a cow. Or your kid. Or someone else's kid. "I defenestrated my neighbor's kid soooo hard!" It comes from an architectural term - fenestrate, which means 'to have windows'. My computer is fenestrated. (snork!) Something can be defenestrated, to - if you remove windows from it. "I installed Linux & now my computer is defenestrated." The root, fenestra is bastardized Latin - the Romans borrowed it from possibly the Etruscans & the French got a hold of it & turned it into fenetre (w/a caret over the last 'e').
Watched this thing on crocodiles last night - or more about a guy looking for fabled 20'-long 'monster' crocs. Most of them have been killed - but he still found a couple in the 18' range. Crocs live long lives - once they reach a certain size, their only predator is human. Takes a saltwater croc about 80 years to hit 20'. They showed some old footage of this guy feeding a captive crocodile that was about 20' long. He held a dead chicken at the end of a pole & dangled it above the crocodile just over his own height, which is 6'. The crocodile he was feeding just lifted its head up & snatched the bird from the pole. The croc didn't even have to lift itself up on its front legs to do it, either, so just this monster's head was about 6' long, if not a few inches longer. It could have eaten the guy feeding it whole, with not an arm or leg outside its jaws. Just one big bite - chomp! That chicken was a chicken nugget to that animal. Made the hair stand up on my arms. I started thinking about how much trouble golfers have with average-sized alligators on Florida golf courses... These things are only about 8' long & they eat golfers regularly. A person wouldn't have a chance in Hel if one of the really big crocs was intent on eating them. I kind of creeped myself out & came to the determination that crocodiles are one of the few creatures on earth that make me feel like potential prey. Rob's friend Ken felt that way about polar bears - said just the fact that polar bears were on the same planet as him made him nervous.
All it means, though, is to 'throw someone or something out a window'. Monkeys chased some poor gov'ment guy in India out the window of an upper floor of a gov'ment building. Ouch. It does give this not-so-dirty word a lot of possible applications, though. You could defenestrate a television, for example. Or defenestrate a cow. Or your kid. Or someone else's kid. "I defenestrated my neighbor's kid soooo hard!" It comes from an architectural term - fenestrate, which means 'to have windows'. My computer is fenestrated. (snork!) Something can be defenestrated, to - if you remove windows from it. "I installed Linux & now my computer is defenestrated." The root, fenestra is bastardized Latin - the Romans borrowed it from possibly the Etruscans & the French got a hold of it & turned it into fenetre (w/a caret over the last 'e').
Watched this thing on crocodiles last night - or more about a guy looking for fabled 20'-long 'monster' crocs. Most of them have been killed - but he still found a couple in the 18' range. Crocs live long lives - once they reach a certain size, their only predator is human. Takes a saltwater croc about 80 years to hit 20'. They showed some old footage of this guy feeding a captive crocodile that was about 20' long. He held a dead chicken at the end of a pole & dangled it above the crocodile just over his own height, which is 6'. The crocodile he was feeding just lifted its head up & snatched the bird from the pole. The croc didn't even have to lift itself up on its front legs to do it, either, so just this monster's head was about 6' long, if not a few inches longer. It could have eaten the guy feeding it whole, with not an arm or leg outside its jaws. Just one big bite - chomp! That chicken was a chicken nugget to that animal. Made the hair stand up on my arms. I started thinking about how much trouble golfers have with average-sized alligators on Florida golf courses... These things are only about 8' long & they eat golfers regularly. A person wouldn't have a chance in Hel if one of the really big crocs was intent on eating them. I kind of creeped myself out & came to the determination that crocodiles are one of the few creatures on earth that make me feel like potential prey. Rob's friend Ken felt that way about polar bears - said just the fact that polar bears were on the same planet as him made him nervous.
