Thursday 20 August 2009

Dictionary corner part 836

By popular demand – and by that I mean at least three people, admittedly one of whom is me – I am turning again to the edifying illustrations of the Oxford-Duden Pictorial English Dictionary.

We'll save the diagrams of the Slaughterhouse (Abbatoir) and Machine Tools part 1 and 2 for a rainy day, and instead plump for a subject that is vaguely topical but still about a month behind everyone else – a position I frequently find myself in – with a celebration of the moon landings.

The most illuminating parts of this illustration are obviously no 15: piece of rock, no 40: window, and no 21: access flap, named with intriguing vagueness given its location just below the groin department. There is a further access flap for the 'purge valve'. What is this for? I don't know, but it suggests that the extreme pressure of being a really big deal in space travel may lead to an unhealthy relationship with one's freeze-dried dinner.


You can click on the image to make it bigger. I only recently discovered this. We are on a journey, you and I. Another journey I am on is trying to scan things squarely, but I'm not expecting to arrive at that destination any time soon.

1 comment:

Lannuss said...

13. Moon's surface, lunar surface, a dust-covered surface.

OK, so I removed the parentheses but that's poetry right there.