Brigid Daull Brockway is technically a writer

Brigid Daull Brockway is technically a writer

A blog about words, wordplay, and etymology, with slightly more than occasional political rants.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

He of the glowing red eyes


If you were to meet a French person and fall in love, and if you spoke only English and she only French, the language you'd speak to each other would be a pidgin. Should you have children, the language that your children would speak would be a creole. So Cajun and Creole aren't the same thing, except they've come to mean the same thing. The word "creole" will always make me think of gumbo and Gambit.

And while we're on the subject of vocabulary and the Ragin' Cajun... Gambit of the X-Men had the power of "kinetic energy." Which made sense when I was 12, as most things do. However, kinetic energy is the energy that objects have while they're in motion. Anyone who can throw a ball (or a playing card) has the power of kinetic energy. When Gambit threw stuff, it exploded. So it was more that he had the power of making things explode. Particularly because, we learned, he didn't actually need to throw things to make them explode. He could just touch them.

Now there was a Marvel comic book character whose power was to throw stuff. She was called Diamondback. So she could be accurately described as having the power of kinetic energy. It's a little weird that someone would create a character named after a snake and have her power involve throwing things, but then again, this does come from the company that thought it was a good idea to name a superhero team "The Howling Commandos."

2 comments:

saltyrose said...

I always think of Haiti now when I hear the word creole, probably because I met so many haitians when I was on the longterm psych unit.

Anthony said...

You are always so hard on the Howling Commandos, when actually such a literal name makes it one of the most sensible team names in the Marvel universe.

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