Sematic xiphoid

sematic (adj.): Serving as a warning or signal of danger. Used especially of the coloring of some poisonous animals.

xiphoid (n.): The posterior and smallest of the three divisions of the sternum, below the gladiolus and the manubrium.

Interestingly, xiphoid is also an adjective that means "shaped like a sword". I bring this up for no other reason than that swords are rather cool. In fact, so cool that I spent my entire american history research period on Friday looking at swords. This site has a bunch of purchasable cool swords, and maybe I'll randomly decide to purchase one one day. Of course, they sell other things besides for swords on that site - for example, if you feel at risk of being attacked, you could always purchase some chain mail (a word of advice, however: my very history knowledgeable friend says arrows can go through chainmail pretty easily). Or if you want, you can also buy full suits of armor, which will be good for decorating the Swedish castle I intend to own in the future.

But anyway, without further ado, here are the Top 10 Swords (in no particular order):

10.

It's Excalibur! Actually, it's not Excalibur... it's a letter opener... that happens to look like the sword in the stone. These must be pretty impressive/cheesy to have on your office desk; whenever a letter comes in you can draw the sword from the stone and mercilessly slice open your letter with triumph! (The stone is probably made out of metal, actually, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was stone... after all, they do have full replica suits of armor...)

9.

This isn't actually a sword either... it's just a dagger. But what this makes this dagger so cool (and also, remarkably distinct from the slightly commonplace assassin-type daggers) are the grooves along its 16 inch blade. And no, the grooves aren't just for grating cheese. The grooves are also awesome at catching and often breaking an incoming sword blade. It was also used often in two-handed fencing/dueling in medieval Italy, but that's another story (involving throwing your cloaks over other people's heads, shaking hands, and why you hold daggers in your left hand).

8.

A sword used during the Civil War by Union officers (you see, the research was sort of relevant...) A 29 inch blade, 35 inches altogether including the hilt. Of course, by this time, swords were becoming a bit useless, but generals still liked them, and they meshed well with the old-style concept of military honor. In fact, here is an entire page about proper etiquette of sword usage (taken from the military manual of the time).

7.

It's William Wallace's sword! He's like, the guy from the intro campaign in Age of Empires 2. What more has to be said?

(It's a replica of his claymore, btw. 56.25 inches.)

6.

Hurray for gigantic German swords. This one happens to be 6.25 feet tall, so it's probably larger than you are. This type of sword is called a "Landsknecht" sword - I mistook it for a "zweihander", the huge German sword that's probably more familiar to people (there should be two dots on top of the i, but I'm not going to look up German accented characters right now). In any case, I found it pretty amusing that over half of the sword consisted of the hilt. Of course, huge 5 foot long blades would be near impossible to forge, but whatever.

I always wondered what two people dueling with zweihander's would look like, but much to my dismay, Wikipedia has informed me that really the ways you'd use a huge sword like this would be to a. run into a bunch of pikemen and swing it wildly, in the hope that you'll break their formation and not be skewered, or b. run around swinging it wildly in the hopes of tripping enemy cavalry. Personally, I think the most effective way to use it would just be to spin it in a circle. Repeatedly.

5.

It's the Knight's Templar Sword! Impressively cool to people that have played Assassin's Creed (unfortunately, they don't sell ring finger blade replacements).

The total length is 46.5 inches. Cool hilt design (the writing on the bottom of the hilt seems to say "Cristi De Templo", which is probably Latin for Knights Templar (but perhaps not?)

4.

It's Merlin's Sword! 45 inches long... the hilt is cool, but I wonder what bird is on the pommel (probably if I knew some more Arthurian stuff I'd get it).

3.

This time it's the Demon Slayer's sword! Another sword from Toledo, Spain (in fact, most of the Toledo Swords, which include the above three, are pretty awesome), you can use it to slay demons! This is because there's a demon's face on the pommel, of course.

2.

The website calls it the Magnificent Sword of Power, and although I don't really see why, it must be pretty magnificent then. And powerful. Also 45 inches long.

1.

The Odachi Samurai sword! No collection of random swords is complete without throwing in any Japanese swords (which, may I remind you, are far better than their European counterparts). I'm not sure if this replica can, but the samurai swords of Ancient Japan could slice through a tree in one swing. In fact, their blacksmithing was so awesome that anyone who revealed the secrets of samurai sword forging would be killed (this is just like the silk thing by the way).

This is a 67 inch sword, which makes it pretty big, even for a samurai sword. Actually, that reminds me, we do have a samurai sword somewhere in my house - it's not as impressive as this though.

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That concludes the top 10 swords thing. By the way, if you ever want to learn about (or just hear the names) of exotic ancient weaponry, go play Diablo or Diablo II - since you get new weapons every 2 or 3 levels, you end up hearing a lot of exotic weapon names. Of course, World of Warcraft has a bunch of interestingly named weapons too - which reminds me, they're making a documentary about WoW addiction =P. Enjoy.

That's all for now. I think I'll start focusing my posts more on individual topics - and also start titling them relevantly (but don't worry, I'll keep the random phrase, just probably move it to the postscript). But it really depends whether I feel like it or not. Until then, ciao.

-squidout