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An Evening on the Edge of Reason
After Magritte
by Tom Stoppard
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The Exhibitionist's Phrase Book
- Copper
<
- n infml
also cop;
a policeman or policewoman
- Cricklewood
- Cricklewood is in North West London, England.
It broadly covers a Mile radius from the intersection of
Cricklewood Broadway / Lane.
www.northwest2.co.uk
- Director of Public Prosecutions
- (abbreviation: D.P.P.)
the British government lawyer who decides in certain
doubtful cases whether a person should be tried by a
court of law
The D.P.P. is the head of the crown prosecution service,
which is the Government Department which
prosecutes people in England and Wales who have
been charged by the police with a criminal offence.
The DPP is
superintended by the Attorney General who is the
Minister responsible to Parliament for the conduct of
most criminal prosecutions.
www.cps.gov.uk/cps_a/what_is.htm
- D.P.P.
- n [the]
abbreviation for Director of Public Prosecutions
- gourd
- a round fruit which has a hard outer shell
and cannot usually be eaten (Cucurbitacea Lagenaria).
In Spanish, the word for gourd
is calabaza.
- the shell of this fruit that can be used for
drinking from or keeping things in
- The Latin American percussion
instrument of the same name is made from a long gourd
with parallel grooves in its surface; the sound is produced by
scraping a stick across the grooves.
For botanical aspects:
www.gourdcentral.com/gquest.html
For the relationship between Magritte and the gourd:
www.gourdcentral.com/sonofman.html
On making gourd instruments:
www.windworld.com/emi/index.htm
- lead slug
- a lump or piece of metal, especially a bullet
- light socket
- that part of a lamp where a bulb fits in;
in Britain and Ireland, the bulb may be replaced
with an adapter that connects a plug to the light
socket.
- loot
- goods taken form an enemy or obtained by robbery, theft
or burglary; spoil; booty.
- lute
- a plucked stringed musical instrument, fretted and with
a round body resembling a halved pear
- lyceum
- a large public room for lectures, theatre performances
or dancing events
- Mafeking
- a town in South Africa, now called Mafikeng, which
British soldiers defended successfully for 217 days
while under attack by the Boers in the Boer War.
There is a chapter called
``The Siege of Mafeking'' in the book
``The Great Boer War''
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
arki-d.hypermart.net/mafkng1.htm
- Magritte, René (1898--1967)
- fervid proponent of imaging the pipe as well as the
tuba; like other famous Frenchmen (such as e.g.
Hercule Poirot, Georges Simenon, César Franck
and French Fries), he is in fact Belgian.
- Maigret, Jules (created in 1931)
- the main character in the very popular books by Georges
Simenon, the Belgian writer. Maigret is a Chief Inspector
of police in Paris.
- more's the pity (with voiced s)
- unfortunately
- morse the pity (with voiceless s)
- to convey pity by telegraphy using the electronic
alphabet designed by Samuel F. B. Morse (1791--1872)
- minstrel
- a white person that disguises as black person
in music shows featuring songs like
"Ole man river"
- nincompoop
- [of obscure origin; probably only a fanciful formation]
old-fashioned, informal
a fool, blockhead, simpleton, ninny.
Hence nincompoopery; nincompoophood; nincompoopish.
- P.C.
- Police Constable;
a policeman having the lowest rank
- Ponsonby
- an inner city suburb of Auckland City, New Zealand,
with buildings from the late 19th century
www.ponsonbyonline.co.nz
- Henry Ponsonby (1825-1895)
Private Secretary to Queen Victoria
www.cwru.edu/UL/SpecColl/Garber/letterp.htm
- Arthur Augustus William Henry Ponsonby (1871--1946)
son of Henry Ponsonby; British politician; at first,
member of the Liberal Party; from 1918 member of the
Labour Party until 1940.
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/TUponsonby.htm
- Sarah Ponsonby
character in Mary Louisa Gordon's story
``Chase of the Wild Goose: The Story of Lady
Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, Known
as the Ladies of Llangollen'',
a fictionalized biography of the lives of
the two once famous Irish women who defied their
families and convention to live peacefully
together in Llangollen, Wales, for fifty years
in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The basic historical source on these two women
is a fragmentary journal left by Butler, some
extracts from which were included in
Arthur Ponsonby's English Diaries (1922)
www.queertheory.com/histories/p/ponsonby_sarah.htm
- Selfridges
- Department Store in Oxford Street, London. Opened in
1909.
- semaphore
- a system of sending messages using two flags held one
in each hand in various positions to represent letters
and numbers
- Simenon, Georges (1903--1989)
- creator of Jules Maigret. With his fellow Frenchman,
René Magritte, he shares being in fact Belgian as
well as a penchant for the pipe.
- sophomore
- a student in the second year of study
in a college or high school
- tortoise
- A four-footed reptile of the order Chelonia,
in which the trunk is enclosed between a carapace and
plastron, formed by the dorsal vertebrae, ribs, and
sternum; the skin being covered with large horny plates,
commonly called the shell.
Cf. turtle
- turtle
- any species of marine tortoise; also extended to various
other tortoises
- yashmak
- [arabic yashmaq]
the double veil conceiling the part of the face below the
eyes, worn by some Muslim women in public
- Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture
(Longman Group UK Limited 1992, Updated Reprint 1993)
- Oxford English Dictionary
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