"parasuicide". maryann said it, i pretended i was already familiar
with it. don't tell her!
― duane, Friday, 11 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)
CALTROP
>
A four-pointed device used to impede pursuit.
The military mind is often both twisted and ingenious. A
caltrop consists of four pointed legs or spines splayed out at
the points of a tetrahedron so that however it falls it will sit on
three of the points with the fourth uppermost. It was apparently
thought up in medieval times as a way of slowing pursuit, and was
updated for the motorised age earlier this century. Scatter some
behind you, and pursuit becomes instantly more difficult, whether
it's on horseback or in a vehicle with pneumatic tyres.
The military device, sometimes written and said caltrap,
appears to have been named after one of a number of plants with spiny
burrs. For obvious reasons it's another name for the star thistle
(Centaurea calcitrapa). It's a local name for the curled
pondweed (Potomageton crispus), which produces lots of winter
seeds that are hard and burr-like. A plant called the water chestnut
(Trapa natans) is also known as the water caltrop, which has
fruit with two spines that are hard enough to penetrate the hooves of
stock as well as human feet.
The word derives from the Old English calketrippe, for any
plant that tended to catch the feet. In turn this comes from the
medieval Latin calcatrippa, a compound either of
calx, "heel" or calcare, "to tread", with a word
related to "trap" that came from one of the Germanic languages. The
military sense of the word probably came into English from French.
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