Word: moorish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...word carousel, Tobin Fraley informs us, is derived from the old Italian carosello, meaning tournament. The term came to refer to the medieval Moorish practice of training mounted swordsmen on wooden horses attached to circling beams. In The Carousel Animal (Zephyr; 127 pages; $19.95) Fraley, an Oakland, Calif, restorer of antique merry-go-round animals, closes the distance between this forgotten martial art and the magic of the amusement park. Gary Sinick's photographs of stallions frozen in mid-prance, oversize rabbits, frogs and chickens reveal the wealth of detail and coloration that distinguished the finest carousel craftsmen...
...Galeotti, in Forte dei Marmi, about three hours' drive from Milan. The decoration there is a kind of bucolic adaptation of the Milan digs, with the same aquatic excess: in this case, an Olympic-size pool. For sun, and the summers, Armani, Galeotti and pals repair to a Moorish-style domed house on the island of Pantelleria, 50 miles off the coast of Tunisia, where nature has supplied her own aquatic excess in the form of the Mediterranean...
...early as the 6th century, in the sub-Sahara, Moorish merchants routinely traded salt ounce for ounce for gold. In Abyssinia, slabs of rock salt, called 'amôlés, became coin of the realm. Each one was about ten inches long and two inches thick. Cakes of salt were also used as money in other areas of central Africa...
...category of last resort. When you're not a novelist of ideas, a spelunker of the soul, or failing that, a lister of the lusts, you are defacto a storyteller Unfortunately, that is not quite the appropriate term For Cheever has, over his career, penned more arabesques than stories. Moorish in their conspicuous lack of breathing things, these works give the feeling that their "characters" are really the pointed little white spots that move in geometrically predestined directions across an oversized etch-a-sketch board. The spots, typically upper middle class suburban or uptown New York spots, meander, speedup...
...problem for the country's rulers. The Basque language (spoken only by about 20% of the region's people) is unique. The Basques have always resented government from afar, a tradition that goes as far back as the 8th century, when they did not submit to the Moorish invasion that conquered most of Spain...