On Tuesday I turned, surely not for the last time, to the nifty free Book of Invention, given away with Sunday's Observer. I only bought the paper to get the book, and only got the book to guarantee a few cheap facts. I'm basically paying for facts now - I'm a John of learning. Anyway, this baby got facts, with all manner of interesting sections. I plumped for a passage about inventions named after their creators - Biro being an obvious example. I also learnt that not only was Braille invented by a guy named Braille, but that Monsieur Braille was himself blind (perhaps not surprising) and invented the system when he was just 15 (wowsers).
To Wednesday, and from great minds overcoming adversity, to dangerous minds spawned from greatness. If you'll forgive the weighty introduction, I'm talking about honorary knighthoods, most notably the one handed out to Robert Mugabe, and rather sheepishly withdrawn last week. I wonder what it was that tipped the scales - he's only been destroying the nation he illegally rules for a decade or so, after all. Perhaps a temp was asked to dust off the file and check that all honorary knighthoods were still legit - you can picture the scene. "Wogan - well he's still pulling in listeners; Bill Gates - bit weird, but I'll let it slide... Robert Mu... oh SHIT". What's amazing is it's not the first time a dictator's been able to sit in his war room polishing up a nice shiny medal - both Caucescu and Mussolini were awarded honorary knighthoods (both were later withdrawn, but that's hardly the point). It makes the excuse of removing Saddam to justify the Iraq war even more laughable, if that was possible...
On to Thursday now, and an attempt to carve out yet another tenuous link... you may have seen some headlines relating to Mugabe or his Zanu-PF party, only using the nation of Zimbabwe to represent them i.e. "Zimbabwe to West: Get off my dick"; "Zimbabwe comments just not cricket" etc etc. Anyway, this is known as a synecdoche. A synecdoche is a term which uses a part of something to describe its whole, or the whole of something to describe one part of it. Examples - "Nice wheels" (wheels meaning car) and "Use your head" (head meaning brain). Saying you want a Coke when you just want a fizzy drink is also an example, though why you'd ever want a drink other than cool, refreshing, flavourful Coke is beyond me (pop the cheque in the post lads).
I found this word courtesy of Empire magazine, which ran a feature on Charlie Kaufmann's new film, Synecdoche, New York. In what sounds like a plot literally picked piece-by-piece out of a hat, Philip Seymour Hoffmann builds a model of New York in a warehouse. I know, it sounds rubbish, but the guy made a film where walking trellis Nicholas Cage plays two different characters, and it was actually quite good, even if it fell apart like Gasquet in the fifth set. And the tenuous links go on...
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