Revanchist

It is a great day when I come across a word I never even thought I saw at any point in my life.  Usually, it is a word that I’ve heard hundreds of times but never could define.  If I do chance across a word I’ve never seen, it usually relates to geology or some strange philosophical issue.  Reading John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, gave me a genuine new word that I might actually use.

A revanchist is a person who believes in revanchism (duh!).  Revanchism is the policy of revenge, particularly in the sense of regaining lost territory.  The term, appropriately was coined in the 1920s.  With World War I at its end, immediately countries began considering taking back what was once theirs.  After the second world war, the term continued its use as countries beyond the Iron Curtain planned for ways to liberate East Germany from Soviet control.  The word presents infinite usages.  I, myself, am already planning to take back control of the near side of the bed from my wife.

Mackintosh

A word I hardly think of anymore until I came across it in John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

First, it’s an apple, but I don’t know anything about apples.  I can identify a granny smith (who can’t?), and maybe a red delicious (it’s red, right?), but a mackintosh? Here‘s a google image.  I guess this is what I imagined they look like.

Does anyone thing of the Apple computer as a Mackintosh any more? I remember I did when they were still little white boxes.  We still called them Mackintoshs back then.  Now, even with the iconic Apple glowing at me from my laptop, I still had to force myself to remember that Mac is an abbreviation.

For the Brits, though, a Mackintosh is something completely different.  It’s a long rubberized raincoat.  It gets its name from Charles Macintosh, the Scot who patented it.  I’m still not sure if it is just a British name for any raincoat or a particular kind.  Life magazine suggests it’s just any old raincoat.  Here’s a photo.

Superannuate

OH MAN! Wrote this and totally forgot to post it.

As much as I’m into detective novels, I am just not that excited about spy novels. It has something to do with my interest in the hero who doesn’t work for the government. Hence, the private detective is my favorite, the disillusioned police detective comes in second. By the time you get to the spy, who represents the deepest levels of government involvement, I’m just much less interested.

All that said, John Le Carré is supposed to be a master, so I started with The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Liked it, didn’t love it, but it gave me a slew of words that will dominate this week’s list.

Superannuate — a word that I couldn’t figure out the meaning of at all despite all my Latin.  Super for “over.” Annus for “year.”  Only when I looked it up did I find that it means to retire someone, particularly with a pension.  As an adjective, it means something that is obsolete with age (I guess making it a slightly more specific choice than obsolete).