Somebody has enquired as to what block it is precisely that a blockbuster film busts. Well, I assume that she meant film. But a blockbust...

As a little follow up to Monday's post on The Charge of the Light Brigade , it's quite astonishing how many clothes are associat...

As a devotee of Tennyson, I've always been horribly irritated that he's best known for his worst poem: The Charge of the Bloody Lig...

There's a rather ungentlemanly term for a woman in Britain: bint . It doesn't mean anything in particular, it's just a synonym ...

The following comes from George MacDonald Fraser's Quartered Safe Out Here . MacDonald Fraser, who would become famous for the Flashman...

The Antipodean wrote to ask why the army contains many majors and no minors. This ignores child soldiers, but is a good excuse for running ...

You can't really wage anything other than war . You can try, but it sounds rather odd. Indeed the phrase waging war gets stranger the ...

Taliban means  students,  but class  means  called to battle . Taliban means students . There's an Arabic word tālib , meaning stud...

Batman is, of course, the name for a military officer's servant. The term derives from the old word bat  meaning a packsaddle . In Amer...

This week's posts will be devoted to nineteen-eighties action movies. It is a sad fact, but true, that a small minority of people can...

The Latin word for being tired or numb was torpere . From this verb they got the adjective torpid , which is still with us today. And that ...

Vin de Champagne originally meant wine from the countryside , as in the modern French campagne . It was only in the eighteenth century, af...

In 1274 Kubla Khan tried to invade Japan. He got an awful lot of soldiers and had just landed them and was getting ready for a nice battle ...

So you're designing a terribly secret weapon and you have to think of a name for it. If you give it a name that actually describes the ...