I like how casually this woman is aiming the gun. The illustrator caught her right at the moment before she pulls the trigger. How cold-blooded and hard looking she is! This is one tough cookie. Usually crime pulp cover women are plumper-cheeked and younger: Dames. This woman is firmly in Broad territory. Incidentally, I’ve …
Tag: Character names
Worldbuilding Wednesday
11/4/20: Military Division Nicknames
The American military has a long tradition of giving colorful nicknames to its various companies, divisions, and specialty groups. To go along with these nicknames are specially commissioned patches to be worn proudly on uniforms or jackets. Take a look at the assortment above. The graphics reached their height of bizarreness during the Vietnam …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 10/14/20:The Best of Twittersnips (Food and Drink)
Yes, there is such a thing as beer for dogs. You can buy it here. One of my favorite things to randomize is food. Because it itself is so random — most people don’t know exactly what they’re going to eat that day. They grab a hot dog from a cart on the street, have …
Worldbuilding Wednesday
8/26/20: Narnia XIII (Let’s Talk About Charn)
Charn vies with Tashbaan as my favorite Narnian fantasy setting. Not that I’d want to live there, of course. It’s dead, dry, and spooky. But Charn in its prime… well! It must have been something to see. One of the reasons it’s so evocative is the name. It’s short and blunt, like a location of …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 7/29/20: Narnia IX (Let’s Talk About Telmar)
In last weeks’ Worldbuilding Wednesday I took a look at the etymology of Prunaprismia and how other women of Telmar might have been named. This week, I’ll look at the men. I think Lewis designed his names with French and Spanish in mind. The pronunciation of them, glottal and oily, recalls spoken Italian as …
Worldbuilding Wednesday
7/22/20: Narnia VIII (Let’s Talk About Queen Prunaprismia)
One of the most oddly named characters in the whole of Narnia is Queen Prunaprismia, the wife of King Miraz. In Prince Caspian Miraz murders his brother, Caspian’s father, and usurps the kingdom, but keeps Caspian as his heir because he has no progeny of his own. But when his wife Prunaprismia becomes pregnant, Caspian …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/22/20: Military Slang, Part II
Among the more well-known of military slang words are snafu and FUBAR. Both originated in WWII. Snafu has since passed into regular language use as a noun meaning a mess, an unexpected monkey wrench thrown into one’s plans. Originally SNAFU, the letters stood for Status Nominal: All Fucked Up, a sarcastic term referring to the …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/15/20: Military Slang, Part I
Military slang is obscure and puzzling even at the best of times. It’s easy for civilians to pick up terms readily bandied about by journalists like MREs (military rations) and those from TV shows and movies, like dogtag and grunt. But there’s a whole slew of others, some dependent on location, like AWACS (Airborne Early …
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