Word: lignum
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...manner of arcane rhymes: the triad, for instance, of the red ball on the ground, the globe over the door and the pompon on the boy's cap. The cast of characters is mixed. The man in white might be a baker, or perhaps Christ carrying the lignum crucis; the two boys are Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the twins from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. It did not escape Balthus that Carroll had a thing about little girls: Tweedledum is molesting Alice. Most of the themes of Balthus's mature work are announced in this strikingly...
...army captain named Joseph Cambell, who had his humble origins as a caddy in Glasgow. Cambell was commanding the British stockade in the Bahamas when he got a craving for the links. He set to work fashioning makeshift clubs out of bamboo saplings and used knots of the native lignum vitae tree to mold golf balls. Cambell laid out a course on the parade grounds below Nassau, and gold was born in the New World...
...Write a brief note on the history of the word "lignum...
Muir, 61, is a carver who penetrates a forest of woods: hard black walnut, violet kingwood, satiny lignum vitae, reddish cocobolo, Pernambuco wood, mahogany, apple, redwood and familiar trees. Occasionally he also works with granite. Yet it is dried seed pods, withered blossoms, moss and lichens that give Muir his forms. "I am a scavenger and gatherer of all sorts of flora not thought much of by most people," he says...
...hair. Gross haunts the lumber yards of New York searching for wood, particularly such exotic varieties as the bright red cocobola from Colombia, ebony from Africa, red-brown rosewood from Brazil, golden-brown teakwood from Burma, striped tigerwood from Nigeria, dark red snakewood from British Guiana and his favorite lignum vitae from Jamaica. In his littered Greenwich Village studio he chips away at them with a caressing affection for the material, slowly turning out the figures that express his own sunny philosophy...