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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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tsuwm posted an interesting word today in his daily vocab mailing, but equally interesting were the companion words. Here's a quote he quoted:
"Foursquare... for the garrote, the gallows, and the
guillotine. Auto-da-fé. Decollation. Defenestration.
Drawn and quartered. Disemboweled. Noyade.
Bastinado. Lapidation. Impalement. Firing squad.
Buried alive. Burned at the stake. Or maybe that's
auto-da-fé, I'm not all that up-to-date on the
Inquisition."
- John Gregory Dunne, Nothing Lost
Noyade? I thought of the Salem witches along with their suffering of 'burning at the stake.' Lapidation? I thought of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery."
When you look at the singular list, I wonder what literary and historical associations might pop into your heads.
I hope I have stated the above in as direct and objective manner as possible so that I would not offend anyone. But the list is both fascinating and, naturally, disturbing, and I thought it would be interesting to know your own associations with these barbaric practices.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Noyade Interdite is a 1987 French film in which the ocean keeps coughing up one body at a time, complicating the investigation by Philippe Noiret.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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What's bastinado?
Foursquare sounds to me like a kind of church.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I must confess that, for me, defenestrate means to switch to Linux (or MacOS). I have often used it as part of a Usenet signature - "defenestration and spheniscation, the path to salvation."
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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>spheniscation
execution by exploding penguin on top of the telly??
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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>spheniscation - execution by exploding penguin on top of the telly??
Used, inaccurately no doubt, to mean, "the act of becoming a penguin."
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veteran
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veteran
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What's bastinado?
Being caned on the soles of your feet. (Esquisite torture, rightly done, sort of like a marketing offsite at an IT company in Silicon Valley but more pleasant.) Cogante with baton ...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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A "bastinado" is a small, padded basket in which one places an illegitimate child to sleep.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Thanks, I think, jheem....
Father Steve, probably not in this context (!) but thanks for your reply, too.
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