Double take

[hawkwing_lb]

I had to share this, because I wonder if anyone else will have the same mental picture I had.



Word of the Day from http://www.askoxford.com


batwoman
• noun (pl. batwomen) a female attendant or cleaner serving an officer in the British services.
— origin Second World War: from bat (see batman) + woman.

Source: Oxford Dictionary of English
http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-861057-2



I knew about batmen, of course, but this?

My mental response was to wonder...



... What kind of an army would it be if the bat-men and -women had black wings and twitchy ears? If they were literally, physically, bat men and women? What kind of society would that be?



I really need to finish a novel one of these days so that I can write another one. :-)

Comments

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Heh. For inspiration, do not read Dave Freer's Rats, Bats and Vats. No indeed. One of Dave Freer is scary enough; we don't need two.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Too late. RBV and RBU both read.

No need to worry about a second Dave: much as I enjoy humour, I don't do it. The world is safe enough. :-)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Phew. Disaster is thusly averted. So. What kind of batmen and batwomen would you do?

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

The oppressed, the downtrodden, the desperate. Having wings would not make these people special, but part of a despised minority...

...Until lo, there was a miracle, and Plot sprang full-formed from the head of Zeus, garbed for war.

I seriously need to do more post-1700s reading. All my history books currently belong to that class of reading called, 'For later', apart from dear old Thucydides, and his History is tough going. I do well to read ten pages at a time.

But the officer-batman relationship seems to be a peculiarly British conceit, and the kind of society that fostered it seems to have been dying out by the end of WWII... *trails off into disjointed and incoherent muttering*

Hmm. I wonder if Dave will let me pick his brains about S. African history? I really need to find some decent histories of the Zulu and Boer Wars that a) weren't written over thirty years ago, and b) are not of approximately the same weight and heft as cannon balls.

The Crimean War, as well, but that's in another part of the world entirely... *more muttering*

Sorry. Thinking out loud. My local libraries aren't exactly overstocked with histories from any of the periods I'm interested in. Leaving aside the issue of finding a historian who not only knows and loves his subject but doesn't go desert-dry and nine different kinds of boring when talking about it.

Reason no. 651 why I'll probably end up in academia: they pay you to obsess about the things that fascinate you, and then communicate them. *g*

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

The officer-batman concept isn't all that alien to USians, as I seem to recall that officers in the American Army -- at least as late as WWII -- had similar enlisted assistants, perhaps called adjutants? They operated in a valet sort of mode, from what I remember of my readings. I've only just recently started reading the American version of events in Europe; my interest has been in European history from 1914-1944, and of overlapping Soviet history. My relatives of Polish and Hungarian/Czech descent escaped -- or didn't -- the Holocaust, and that's been my primary interest.

Anyways. I think the concept isn't totally alien to Americans, or Canadians, so it shouldn't be such a difficult thing to sell.

Academia is nice and all, but very protected. Government work is even better. ;-) You mustn't tell anyone that I said so. Plausible deniability, yanno.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Mutterings about officer-batman relationships and history is my brain trying to work out loud. I wasn't suggesting it would be an alien concept to the North American cousins :) - it's practically an alien concept to me - but before anything else I have to figure out what kind of concept I'm pondering :-).

If I succeed academically, I can happily and legally torture students for the rest of my days. :-) Whilst availing of nice, long, in-between-term breaks to do... other things. :-) Who wants to work for the government? They'll only screw you over and then screw you out of your pension. ;-)

I'm currently working with a lot of Polish, and learning interesting new things. The only interesting thing about work is the people. :)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Mutter away, then, and pay me no mind. As for the government, the trick is to stay low enough in the heirarchy that you can avoid the troubles, and yet be high enough to get paid well enough. ;-)

For the Polish, tell 'em I told you to (phonetically spelled) "seroye-nisht ne guvniak". See what happens. ;-)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Because you are an evil person, I rather suspect that's rude. :-) What does it mean?

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

::sniffle:: You don't trust me! Oh, I'm so proud of you!

It means, literally, "Don't make waves". The story that usually goes along with it refers to being nose-deep in cow poop...i.e., in a situation where if you make waves, you will be inundated with manure.

Then again, maybe they haven't heard the same Polish stories I have, so it wouldn't be funny. ;-) I just wondered.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I think you have strange ideas of 'funny'.

:-)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

It was hilarious when I was a kid! Well, perhaps you had to be there. My grandfather had lots of funny stories.