Wednesday 28 August 2013

Gorilla warfare

From The Local:

A gorilla opened a gash in a Swedish woman's forehead after throwing rocks at her at a Swedish zoo on Saturday.

The woman, 38, was hit in the forehead by the stone, which was thrown by one of the five gorillas at the Kolmården National Park in central Sweden. The stone measured roughly five centimetres in diameter, said Marjorie Castro, head of the zoo...

However, following the news of the stone-throwing gorilla, other Swedes shared similar stories about their experiences with the Kolmården primates. The mother of a 7-year-old boy told Aftonbladet that Enzo the gorilla had thrown a stone at her son in July last year.

"I got so scared and was thinking 'Please, don't throw rocks," the boy told the paper. "They are scary."

Kolmården made headlines in June last year when the zoo's wolf pack mauled and killed a female employee.

10 comments:

Kj said...

Apparently they can do sign language. He was merely trying to communicate "fuck off, what are you looking at?".

benj said...

You seem to have missed the even more interesting story "Swede blooded in beaver attack".
http://www.thelocal.se/48932/20130708/

Kj said...

Can you say bloodied?

Mark Wadsworth said...

BJ, no possibility for double entendres there, eh?

Kj, the headline was " bloodied" actually and it is perfectly good English. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bloodied

"Blooded" (without the "i") is a different word, i.e. "warm blooded" or "cold blooded".

Bayard said...

Odd use of the word "bloodied", though, as it implies that the blood was the beaver's, which it wasn't. If the blood was the woman's then I think we would have used "injured" in the UK.

Anonymous said...

B, I personally would steer well clear of "bloodied" and "blooded" as they are adjectives apparently derived from a verb where nobody ever uses the verb itself.

Like "large sized", does anybody consciously "size" something?

Kj said...

B: my thoughts exactly, plus I've not come across the word bloodied. But maybe it was a word picked to portray a mild injury. But still used the word "attack", which is exaggerating if you read the story.
I'd go for "Confused Beaver leaves woman with stitches"... err.. maybe not.

Bayard said...

The English language is littered with past participles and other formations, where the root word has become disused, just as it is littered with words that only survive in a single phrase. The verb "to blood" still crops up now and again, but the verb "to bloody" seems to have died a death. The verb "to size", while rare, still hangs on in there in its meaning of "sort by size".

Kj, how about "Beaver confusion leaves woman hurt"?

Anonymous said...

B, yes, but "sizing" in that context means "to measure".

If you get a "super-sized" meal at McD's then has the person behind the counter "sized" it?

Or is it "super-size meal" without the "d".

In fact "disused" is another one. Have you ever "disused" anything.

"Oh - the lawnmower? I disused that once we'd concreted over the garden."

Bayard said...

I think the implication is that someone, somewhere has sized the meals on offer and the super-sized meal has been judged to be extraordinarily large. Alternatively, there is a verb, "to super-size" (along the lines of downsize) hiding away somewhere, which means, presumable, "to make extraordinarily large", or the word was made up purporting to be the past participle of such a verb, which has never existed. With English, especially since the Americans got hold of it, the possibilities are endless.