Word: emblem
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...helmet had to convey no meaning to the warlord's troops except its own singularity. It was the exact reverse of a "uniform"; it was a portable spectacle. Its shape was not determined by the kind of functional rules that governed the making of a samurai's main emblem, the katana or long sword, whose basic form was fixed by the 13th century and did not alter much in the next 600 years. Instead, the helmet--his secondary emblem of power--could mean anything its owner wanted. It was as personal, in that sense, as the poetry whose writing...
...every dragon, lion or bear, there is an emblem that seems to have no ferocity at all. A modern officer might not wish to appear before his men with a pair of enormous formalized rabbit ears stuck to his helmet. One might as well pretend to be a chicken. But not in 17th century Japan, where rabbits symbolized long life and virility and were a favored helmet motif. (Americans see an old man in the moon; Japanese saw the silhouette of a rabbit with mortar and pestle, pounding out the elixir of life.) Likewise, the clam is peaceable...
...Brown Bomber, the Dark Destroyer, the Sepia Slugger, the Mahogany Maimer, the Chocolate Chopper, the Tan Tarzan of Thump. These were far more than sobriquets. As Chris Mead observes in his enlightening biography, Champion, Heavyweight Joe Louis Barrow could never be a mere titleholder. He was always an emblem...
...late 1930s. It was members of the Totenkopf ("Death Head") SS who served as guards and executioners at the concentration camps, wearing black caps and skull-and-crossbone insignia on their collars. The double S was rendered in a lightning-bolt design that, along with the swastika, became an emblem of the Nazi regime...
...magnificent birds, with their eight-foot wingspan, striking white heads and piercing yellow eyes, are recognized worldwide as an American national emblem. But in the mid-1990s they were nearly wiped out in the lower 48 American states by chemical pesticides like DDT. While many U.S. populations have recovered, the majority of the world's 100,000 bald eagles still live in Alaska and B.C., says Canadian biologist Richard Cannings. And while the B.C. eagle population is thriving, large-scale poaching in the province threatens American bird populations, because eagles from throughout the western U.S. migrate to B.C. each winter...