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Monday 11 November 2019

Spot the Frippet: soldier.

You can find soldiers are all over the place, but they're mostly harmless.

A soldier course, for instance, does not usually involve assaulting obstacles such as walls, but building them: it's a row of bricks standing on their smallest side with their narrow side facing outwards along the wall.

The bricks are called soldiers because they stand up straight, and the same principle has been used to name the strips of bread or toast cut for dipping into a soft-boiled egg.

Less benign are the soldier ants, egaponera analis, which launch attacks on the termite colonies upon which they feed:

File:Megaponera analis raid collecting termites.jpg
photo by ETF89

or the soldier crabs:

Pagurus bernhardus.jpg
By © Hans Hillewaert, <a title="Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0">CC BY-SA 4.0</a>, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=385532">Link</a>

which live in molluscs' shells and will fight each other for the best ones (these crabs, also called hermit crabs, also, of course, wear armour).

And then there are the human soldiers. Some help out in emergencies:

File:NZ Army Engineers repair water mains at Burwood Hospital after Christchurch Earthquake - Flickr - NZ Defence Force.jpg
New Zealand troops repairing water main after Christchurch earthquake Photo by New Zealand Defence Force: https://www.flickr.com/people/56631565@N06

some keep the peace:

File:Bangladesh UN Peacekeeping Force-3.jpg
Pakistan. Photo by Sqn.Ldr.Zaman & Faisal

and some, I'm afraid, break it.

Still, they're usually the ones trying their best to be invisible, so you're not likely to spot one of those.

File:Army Reservists Applying Camouflage MOD 45156163.jpg

Spot the Frippet: soldier. This word comes from the Old French soudier, from soude, pay, from the Latin solidus, a gold coin, which is also the Latin for firm (as in, not wobbly).



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