Henry S Shatner General Henry Shrapnel, Marquis De Sade, Leopold Von Sacher Masoch discussed on Something Rhymes with Purple
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
French espanol dictionaries out there, so I'll have a look. Good. Okay, give me some more. Have we got time? Okay, well, shrapnel goes back to Henry S Shatner general Henry shrapnel, who, during the Peninsula war, so this is in the early 19th century, invented a shell that had bullets in it in a small bursting charge. So when it was fired, it would burst the shell and scatter bullets. So pretty horrible, really. It was called shrapnel shell and the bullets were called shrapnel shot or simply shrapnel for short, but what I always find interesting is that shrapnel also took on a slang sense, meaning coins. So soldiers returning from the First World War would talk about shrapnel in their pocket, meaning loose change. Gosh, it's interesting, a number of these words have a military, the several of the words we've already mentioned have a sort of military connotation. I agree. I can take you on to sadism if you like. Yes, introduced me to sadism. Okay. So we have the French writer and he was a soldier too, I think, or the Marquis de Sade, to thank for this. So he was imprisoned in the late 18th and early 19th century. I think for writing pornographic books. I don't know if that was exactly why he was imprisoned, but anyway, we know that he wrote these books. And one perversion in particular really fascinated him, and that was inflicting pain on others and the arousal that came from that. So the French named it studies and we took on the word sadism, and it's contrasted with masochism, which is pleasure to write or sexual pleasure, particularly derived from experiencing that pain yourself. And that's another eponym. That's in the Austrian writer, Leopold von sacher masoch, and the German team was really hard to say, and that's what kids miss. And then again, we adopted that as masochism. Well, I used to live in Paris, and I once saw a remarkable play about the Marquis de Sade. I felt embarrassed to be going to see it, it's extraordinary that all these years after he was born in 1740, so all these years later, his name is still very much part of the language. But I was very struck by how small the actor playing the maquis de Sade was. And I met him afterwards in the bar it was on this little tiny theaters that they have in Paris. It was really more of a bar and you met the cast at the bar after the show. And he told me that he was taller than the Marquis de Sade. And this actor was only about 5 foot tall and the market decide was around 5 foot tall, but he was supposed to be very good-looking. And in the story, they told how, at the age of 14, he joined the army. And he married he married well and his wife, towered over him, and certainly part of the clay was this contrast between his tall wife and this small man and the games they got up to. Anyway, we don't need to go into all that. This is a family of podcast. Oh, I've got a quotation here from.