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As I climb slowly upward during this year's assault on Tolstoy's massif War and Peace (Ann Dunnigan's translation) I occasionally am forced to pause on the word "verst" --- clearly a unit of distance, as the Russian army struggles to traverse countless versts. There's much the feel that I had upon laboring to cross a "league" in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
But how far is a verst? Turning to the Net of Lies and Occasional Truths, one finds that a verst (more properly Верста = versta) is a traditional Russian unit equal to 500 sazhen (сажень); a shazen in turn is 3 arshin (аршин). And finally the light dawns: an arshin is defined as 28 English inches. So a sazhen converts to 7 feet, and a verst comes to about two-thirds of a mile (~1.07 km). Now I can get back to those forced marches, pursued by Napoleon ...
(see also CreativeDevices (1 Jan 2001), TruthInBattle (11 Feb 2001), RaggedRunner (23 Mar 2002), ... )
TopicLiterature - TopicScience - TopicLanguage - TopicHumor - Datetag20040922
Massif = massive.
Who knew? Now I need to find a word that describes a word that appears to be misspelled but isn't. I'm almost willing to bet it all that German has one! -- ANS
tnx, ANS! ... and I was also trying to make a riff on the other meaning of massif, a mountain range or chunk of the Earth's crust, as in "Balkan massif", essentially the only context in which I've seen "massif" used ... ^z