Difference between revisions of "C"

Latest revision as of 09:05, 18 March 2021

433; Spanish: lit. "he-goat"; fig. "bastard"

Caesar, Julius (100-44 BC)
306; Roman general, statesman and writer; 322; 481; 482; 485

Café Phoenicia
470; in Valletta

Cairo
77; Capital of Egypt and a major port just south of the Nile Delta in the northeast corner of Africa

caitiff
308; someone who is cowardly or despicable

Camaroon
267; Republic located in west-central Africa. Under British and French control from WWI until 1960.

Campagna
184; region in central Italy around Rome

Cannes
186; French city southwest of Nice on the Cote d'Azur; 219

Cape Town
241; capital of Union of South Africa and located on the southernmost tip of Africa

"Capo di minghe!"
164; Italian (southern): "Dickhead!"; Read more...

Caprivi, George Leo, Graf von (1831-99)
239; German militaryman who succeeded Bismarck as imperial chancellor and Prussian prime minister

carabinieri
205; a member of the Italian national police force

CARE
305; Cooperative for American Relief to Everywhere; U.S. charitable organization

caries
153; progressive destruction of bone or tooth, esp. tooth decay

Carruthers-Pillow
458; S. Stencil's superior at Whitehall

Cassar
446; shopowner in Valletta who knows possible whereabouts of glass eye; Etymology

catechumen
123; one receiving instruction in the basic doctrines of Christianity before becoming a full member of the church

cause and effect
306; 489

CCNY
128; City College of New York

Celda Museo
387; museum in Majorca

Cellini, Benvenuto (1500-71)
159; Florentine goldsmith and sculptor expelled from Florence for dueling. Returned to Florence later in life and worked under patronage of Cosimo I de'Medici

dead center, 22, 44; center of "one of those queer lulls in the noise level of any room," 93; "center of her face," 109; center of town, 188, 207; "I wanted to stand in the dead center of the carousel," 205; "geographical center of the midtown employment agency belt." 213; "self-centered," 214; "a great wooden sun [...] in the very center," 239; "street's center-line," 244; "down the center-line of the skull," 268; "new ones bloom in the centres of old" 323; "Profane felt that [...] he'd come to dead center in Nueva York;" 368; of gravity, 390; "nine light years from rim to center," 394; of the seat, 394; "Itague stood in the center," 396; "a large pouf in the center of the room," 406; "center of the mob," 440; "center of the ceiling," 453; "circle centered at Xaghriet Mewwija," 462; "In the center was a cistern, its rim adorned with a dark sunburst of sewage." 469; See also circles

Cesare
159; "seedy looking Calabrese" and Mantissa's "accomplice in crime"

C'est Magnifique
438/486; 1953 popular song written by Cole Porter for his musical Can-Can; played by hot-jazz band in Metro, in Valletta

Chapman, Maj. Percy
181; English Consul-General in Florence; 183; 188

Charisma
51; member of Whole Sick Crew; 124; 224; 287; 295; 300;

Charivari, La
407; French: "the loud music"; See also shivaree

432; In Greek legend, a monster, the whirlpool she formed and the rock cliff under which she lived, facing Scylla on the other side of the Straits of Messina; See also Scylla; Straits of Messina

157; French: "beloved balloon"; a bay (horse that's bay colored) Evan Godolphin bets on in Paris and wins 17,000 francs in 1899

Chester's Hillbilly Haven
21; bar in Norfolk, VA

Chiclitz Toy Company
227; outlet in Nutley, NJ, in late 1940s

chiffonnier
399; French: "ragman"

Chobb, Nasty
433; the baker; plays trumpet on Route 66 in the Union Jack in Valletta; in H.M.S. Ceylon cap, 443

Chopin, Frederic (1810-49)
387; Polish composer and pianist

Christian, Abraham
255; chief of Bondelswaartz Hottentots in Südwest, shot in Warmbad

Christian, Jacobus
232; Bondelswaartz leader in Südwest

Cinderella liberty
???/487; in the Navy, a liberty (shore leave) that ends at midnight of a given day

Cinoglossa
444; homosexual, epileptic poet friend of Stencil's

"[the Church] formed along with uncle Evelyn the foci of her serene orbit" 72; "three jailbait [...] stood in front of the wheel of Fortune" 139; "[Chiclitz] and Eigenvalue were part of the same Circle." 152; "He belonged to that inner circle of deracinated seers" 160; "I wanted to stand in the dead center of the carousel" 205; "Foppl's own planetarium, a circular room with a great wooden sun" 239; "our Vheissus are no longer our own, or even confined to a circle of friends" 248; "as if Stencil's notion of an inner circle were correct after all" 297; "Fortune's wheel [...] the hub still held the spokes in place and the meeting place of the spokes still defined the hub" 338; "the children's wheel was dead-level, its own rim only that of the sea's horizon" 338-39; "a radius along with leather-winged Lucifer" 339; "an inner circle of enlisted men" 373; Sirius' "halo of plague, which is nine light-years from rim to center" 393-94; "the invisible circle centered at Xaghriet Mewwija with Lampedusa on the rim" 462; "Malta as a charmed circle, some stable domain of peace" 480; "if only to complete a circle begun in England eighteen years ago" 489; "Draw a line from Malta to Lampedusa. Call it a radius. Somewhere in that circle [...]" 492; See also center; clock

"old clock," 34; "clock of a heart," 40; "turn-of-the-century clock" in Shoenmaker's office, 45-46, 96, 102; "an illuminated clock near Paola Maijstral's bed," 51-52; "unwound like a clock's mainspring," 52; "The train [...] ran on a different clock--its own, which no human could read" 77; "the simple clockwork of itself," 217; "We are [...] the lead weights of a fantastic clock, necessary [...] to keep an ordered sense of history and time prevailing against chaos" 233; "Inside were the delicately wrought wheels, springs, ratchets of a watch, wound by a gold key," 237; "The black oak clock above the fireplace ticked terribly loud in strange waves of silence," 244; "Cuckoo's in his clock with laryngitis," 261; "man as a clockwork automaton" 284; "aware of a clock ticking on the table," 294; "there was only the ticking of the clock," 295; "ticking time-bomb," 300; "I broke the electric alarm clock," 301; clockwise, 305; "Rachel's electric clock," 368; "glass eye in the shape of a clock," 388; "a traveling clock chimed seven" 392; "clock inside the Gare du Nord," 393; clock-tower, 426; "though the drunk's clock slows down, it doesn't stop" 438; "the clockwork figure," 454; "the travelling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys" 454; clock-iris, 487; "as if it were marked by any old and overprecious clock which could be wound and set at will" 489; See also time

C.O.
220; commanding officer

375; a cargo compartment from the Chesapeake & Ohio railroad; can be seen all over the central East Coast. "Chessie," a sleeping kitten illustrating a magazine ad in 1933, was adopted by the C&O as a mascot. Various graphics featured Chessie, eventually leading to the stylized silhouette over a capital C sometimes seen today.

cognates
465; In the context of V., Spanish words that mean the same thing, or have the same derivation

coitus interruptus
Paola & Profane, 19; Rowley-Bugge & Alice, 70; Profane & Lucille, 144; Italian couple H. Godolphin interrupts, 185; Rachel & Profane, 359; Pig & Paola, 370-71

Collecteurs Généraux
132; worked the main sewer line which ran under Boulevard St. Michel

Colonna, Pompeo
464; of the famous Roman family which included a pope (Martin V), several cardinals, generals, statesmen and noted scholars; sent by the Pope with 1200 men to relieve La Valette

Colonel Bogie
325; Colonel Bogey was the fictitious eponym of the "Colonel Bogey March," composed by F. J. Ricketts (as Kenneth J. Alford) in 1914. The tune is featured in the score of the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Comitato Patriottico
472; one of three Mizzist "clubs" in Malta in 1919; 477

complexity/chaos
The Situation as, 189; "Any minor accident: a break in the clouds, a castastrophic shivering at the first tentative blow to a shop window, the topology of an object of destruction (up a hill or down--it makes a difference)- anything might swell a merely mischievous humor to suddenly apocalyptic rage." 477; "Who knows how many thousand accidents--a variation in the weather, the availability of a ship, the failure of a crop--brought all these people, with their separate dreams and worries, here to this island and arranged them into this alignment? Any Situation takes shape from events much lower than the merely human." 483; Education of Henry Adams

Conferment of Degrees law, 1915
490;

coño
135; Spanish: "pussy"

Constantinople
462; Originally called Byzantium (c.660 BC - 330 AD), and since 1930 Istanbul, Constantinople was founded by Constantine I in AD 330, becoming the new capital of the Turkish Empire. Now the capital of Turkey, it is located on a thin strip of land (the Golden Horn) between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara.

431; "Scaffold's damage-control assistant" in Malta; 433

Convoy Escort Piers
375; in Norfolk, VA, where Scaffold is docked; 376

71; published tour guides and conducted quick, cursory tours; 76; 77; 156; 184; 190; 204; 408;

cool
"too cool. Too unemotional when he said 'I have a problem with my woman.'" 292; "As long as you were flop, everything was cool." 293; "the cool scene after the war" 299; "It will be cool." 301; "There is no tension or malaise to this silence; it's cool, secure." 324; "the only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work." 365; "keep cool but care" 366 (Sphere), 369 (SHROUD)

Coptic
84; relating to a people who descended from the ancient Egyptians

cormorant
248, 320; any of a family of dark waterbirds with a long neck, hooked bill, and neck pouch; by extension, gluttonous or greedy

corsair
462; a pirate, esp. a privateer of the Barbary Coast

corvette
304; highly maneuverable armed escort ship that is smaller than a destroyer

"I like to see young people get together." 31; "a ready acceptance of miracles or visions," 200; "they seemed to give up external plans, theories and codes [...] to indulge in being simply and purely young," 201; "Inanimate money was to get animate warmth," 214; "life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and still stay sane." 321; "We cannot expect more of the bombs than of the wind." 322; "It is a universal sin among the false-animate and unimaginative to refuse to let well enough alone. Their compulsion to gather together [...] extends on past the threshold of sleep;" 323; "horror of isolation," 324; "no conscious plot/Drove us underground" 326; "accumulation of small accidents" 330; "towards peace and simplicity" as opposed to "exhausted intellectual searching" 309; "once the inadequacy of optimism is borne in on him by an inevitably hostile world, to retreat into abstractions" 310; See also paranoia

coutourière
166; fashionable custom-made women's clothes shop

Covess
188; school chum of S. Stencil

CP
100; custom of port

459; a peninsula in the extreme southern Soviet Russia, bordered by the Black Sea to the east, south and west. The Crimean War (1853-56) was Russia against Turkey, Britain and France. Russia was defeated and Turkey's independence thus guaranteed. (The Charge of the Light Brigade and the nursing of Florence Nightingale occurred during this war.)

Crockett, Davy (1786-1836)
219-20; American frontiersman and statesman; died fighting for Texas' independence from Mexico at the Alamo

Cromer, Lord Evelyn Baring (1841-1917)
91; English consul-general in Egypt 1883-1907

Cuernacabrón
179; Spanish: cuerna: "horns" + cabrón: "bastard" = "horny bastard"; The Gaucho's lieutenant; 202; 206

Cunard
189; shipping line between Britain and America began in 1839

curvet
262; when a horse makes a prancing leap such that for an instant all its legs are in the air

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