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:


photo by ETF89

or the soldier crabs:


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:


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:


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.



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).