How It's Used

“I was in the Kotokuruba Market in Cape Coast, a city of about 82,000 people in the West African nation of Ghana, on a Wednesday morning last summer. The market rocked with music, from hip-hop, pulsing from loudspeakers, to tribal drumming. Honking taxis fought pedestrians for space. The stalls seemed to sell just about anything—machetes and huge cast-iron cooking pots, pirated DVDs and homemade slingshots. A blacksmith worked a piece of iron over an open-air hearth; I picked up one of his earlier creations: a gangkogui, which is an elongated cowbell, the kind used as percussive accompaniment in drumming ceremonies. Its forged and hammered metal had been wrought into elegant, almost arabesque, curves.”

“Beginning in Galileo's lifetime, therefore, laws swept through Italy requiring parents to record both first and last names for their children. If a family had a traditional surname, they usually used that. If not, they resorted to town of origin or occupation, and then these names were passed down through the generations. For the first time, a person named da Vinci might not actually be from Vinci. A man named Ferrari might not be a blacksmith.”

“The communities dotting the [Millstone Valley Scenic] [B]yway are surprisingly undeveloped, which in a historian's vernacular means that they are well-preserved. Millstone, for example, has a gas station and a humble convenience store. An 1834 blacksmith shop now houses a museum demonstrating the inner workings of a forge. An Indian grinding stone the size of a boulder sits out front, an artifact from the first inhabitants. A similar mortar rests on the front lawn of an 18th-century Dutch Reformed church, which was reduced to firewood by British forces during the Revolutionary War. (It has since been rebuilt.)”

“In the early years of the second world war, the chief of imperial general staff was General Sir Edmund Ironside, and the commander of the Eighth Army in north Africa, before his aircraft was shot down and he was killed, was Lieutenant General William Gott. From his earliest days in the army, Ironside had been known as 'Tiny', as he was six-foot-four and built like a blacksmith, but the other man had a nicer nickname. In the previous war, the execration 'Gott strafe England'–'May God ­punish England'–was a popular slogan with our foe. And so, from the time he was commissioned in the King's Royal Rifle Corps in 1915, the future general was 'Strafer Gott'.”

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