Friday, October 02, 2009

Friday Crab Blogging

Guest Crabs from across the Sea




Now the following purports to be a crab, but I have my doubts

Does it not look like my favorite vector chowing down and feeding its own parasites?





I really like this crab by Dharti. It has sort of a sardonic grin. But, wait, do I really know what sardonic means? Somewhere I read that if one was great, or aspired to greatness, being sardonic was a necessity to avoid hubris. There, two ten cent words: sardonic and hubris:

From here:
an ancient belief that ingesting the sardonion plant from Sardinia (Greek: Sardō) would result in convulsions resembling laughter and, ultimately, death.

Maybe Sir Author Conan Doyle said it better:
His muscles were set as hard as a board in the most exaggerated rigor mortis, while the contraction of the fibres had drawn his mouth into a hard sardonic grin.


Hubris has some interesting sides:
The word was also used to describe actions of those who challenged the gods or their laws, especially in Greek tragedy, resulting in the protagonist's downfall.
These things resonate now with my reading of "Dune." I see connections to Star Wars stuff. The "spice" of Dune morphs into "Nostrilia" with its "huge, diseased sheep" producing stroon.

2 comments:

Ray Girvan said...

The whole "sard" thing gets complicated: there's also sardonyx, which according to the OED was originally onyx from Sardis (and it wouldn't surprise me if there's been some etymological crosstalk between Sardis "sard-" and Sardinia "sard-").

So, Joker venom really exists?

Julie Heyward said...

Sardonic grin = Sean Connery. Whom, come to think of it, that crab looks very much like. The 007 of crabs.