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struthious: [Latin: struthio ostrich] \strew' thee ous\ resembling an ostrich.
ratite [ratios raft] /ra' tite/ a synonym for ostrich; to be more accurate, this is a bird with a flat breastbone and rudimentary wings, i.e. ostrich, emu, kiwi and a moa.
stygian: [the river Styx] \stih' jee an\ dark, forbidding.
In Greek mythology, after death people are borne over the river Styx to Hades. I recently read Dante’s Inferno and his portrayal of the river Styx was a dark and forbidding scene of course.
suede: [French] means "Sweden" (pronounced 'shwed' in French). Leather with a napped surface. gants de Suéde, Swedish gloves
Svedberg Unit: a part of a second. 10 to the minus 13th of a second (a ten trillionth of a second)
I recall reading a NYT’s article twenty years ago about the new record for recording the shortest measurement of time. It described, as I recall, documenting a small movement of atomic particles in so many Svedberg Units. The analogy was that one Svedberg unit is to one second just as one day is to several trillion years.
In physics, a second is defined as about 9 billion oscillations of a cesium atom.
This unit was named after a Swedish chemist, Theodor Svedberg (b. 1884), a winner of the Nobel Prize in 1926 in chemistry and inventor of the ultracentrifuge.
swagger: to walk in a "superciliously pompous" manner.
This is where an editor is useful; in popular Western paperbacks, I am sure they replaced “He entered the dusty bar with a superciliously pompous gait”…with “He entered the dusty bar with a swagger.”
swanherd: one who tends swans
There is a swanherd in England who works at The Abbotsbury Swannery. He states that he is the only swanherd in the country. Also, notably, the queen has a swan warden. His description of his work actually sounds like a very rewarding job if you enjoy conservation and nature.
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