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Earth is a much-pelted planet. Like some suicidal magnet, gravity impels cosmic debris to fling itself upon our innocent, flimsily gas-encased sphere. Many of these luminous meteoric intruders are engulfed in voracious paroxysms of self-ignition and burn themselves to puny ash long before they pierce earth-crust. But large, charging, wild-boar meteorites thrust exploding tusks into our rock-crammed gut regularly. Over numberless millennia meteorites have given earth’s rind the look of a blue-green zitty face, pocked with star dents, with astroblemes.
The rocket-eyed moon from the early Lumière silent film illustrates my visual point.
A term from geology and mineralology, astrobleme has a blunt meaning: star-wound. An astrobleme is the weathered scar left by a meteorite on the impacted surface of the earth. A playful alternate name might be — astroblemish. Astron is the classical Greek word for star. Used in classical Greek warfare vocabulary, blema was the wound in a human body pierced by a thrown spear. Its root meaning is ‘something tossed’ from the Greek verb ballein ‘to throw,’ so blema could also signify the missile itself, a javelin, a lance, a kidney-ripping spike, a chest-splitting spear. Blema also meant the casting of dice, a roll of the dice. Right here in my native Canadian province of Ontario, we have the lithic scar tissue, the residual wound of one of the largest meteorites ever to strike earth’s fragile crust. This superimpactor fell to earth about 1.8 billion years ago near Sudbury, Ontario and is the foundation event of the Sudbury basin. It’s a story worth investigating on the internet.
© 2008 William Gordon Casselman
If you want to share some wonderful Canadian sayings, you will find more than 3,000 Canadian expressions in my books. Each of my three volumes of Canadian Sayings contains about 1,200 zesty phrases used by Canadians both today and throughout our history. Remember that profits from the sale of my books keep this website online.
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2007 - Bill Casselman's latest publication is an essay in a new book entitled Barry Callaghan: Essays on his Works in the Writers Series published by Guernica Editions
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order online from Chapters/Indigo Says one reader on the Chapters website: “If you're Canadian you gotta read this book. This book made me laugh till I cried. Things I thought only I heard during my youth were there in print before my eyes! I love this book. Everyone I show it to has the same reaction. Different sayings tickled my funny bone on different days - so they never get boring. Keep up this wonderful treasure-trove of Canadiana, Bill.” — Angie Plamondon published by McArthur & Company, Toronto, Canada
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