Sturt's desert pea

World English Dictionary

Sturt's desert pea

—n
	(Austral) the desert pea

[named after Charles Sturt (1795--1869), English explorer of the Australian interior]

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
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WordNet

sturt's desert pea
noun
sprawling shrubby perennial noted for its scarlet black-marked flowers; widely distributed in dry parts of Australia [syn: desert pea]

WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.
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00:10

Sturt's desert pea is always a great word to know.

So is interrobang. Does it mean:

a children's mummer's parade, as on the Fourth of July, with prizes for the best costumes.

a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

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Matching Quote

"The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun's rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert—a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth."

-Jean Baudrillard

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