Bird’s eye mural magic
QUESTION Which is the largest mural ever painted?
According to guinness World records, The Pueblo Levee Project in Pueblo, colorado, U.S., was the largest mural in the world, at 178,200 square feet (16,554.8 square metres).
The record-breaking mural is two miles long, 58ft tall and painted along a stretch of the flood defences. Founded in the Seventies, the mural contained back-to-back contributions by hundreds of public artists.
Anyone was able to contribute, which meant the art varied in quality and subject matter, depicting everything from a Mexican Jesus to Bob Marley, a dinosaur and a series of Andy Warhol replicas.
Two-thirds of the mural was removed in 2015 when the levee underwent essential repairs.
given its patchwork nature, some have questioned The Pueblo Levee Project’s status as a single mural.
A better contender might be the work of French Street artists Ella & Pitr. in 2015 they produced a giant mural in Stavanger, norway, called Lilith And olaf.
The giant artwork features Lilith, a giant curled-up female figure with red toenails, and a smaller crowned figure olaf, a representation of King olaf i of norway, who ruled between 995 and 1000.
The mural, painted on a series of industrial buildings, measures 225,000 square feet (21,000 square metres), about the size of three- and- a- half football pitches. it is designed to be seen by passengers taking off from Stavanger airport.
Mary-Ann Sutton, Leicester.
QUESTION Why are there so many ‘gates’ — such as Margate, Ramsgate, Sandgate — in Kent?
ThE word ‘gate’ has a number of meanings, the most obvious being a movable barrier to allow entry or exit from garden. the place a piece however, names of land referred the such context to as most a in field which likely or originate Vikings, is more in Viking specifically terminology. danes under halfdan, invaded the east coast of Anglo-Saxon England in 865. Within a decade they had conquered most of eastern England.
Since these early times there were many words for a road or thoroughfare, including ‘way’, especially the important ridgeways, which were the equivalent of our motorways in pre-historic times.
‘Street’ entered the language under the roman occupation, and this survives in place names such as Street, Stretton, Stretford and Stratford.
The Viking word for a road was ‘gate’, and the places mentioned most likely reflected their position on the end of the ‘sand road’, or ‘rams road’ (sheep were an important commodity for centuries); and ‘Mar’ might have derived from ‘mer’ (sea). other examples include coppergate (the famous Viking excavations at York), and gateshead, on the Tyne.
centuries later, when mining became an important part of the north-eastern economy, the word was adopted for the transport system. A ‘gate’ or ‘gait’ was the term used for a journey taken by a horse-drawn wagon containing coal or iron from the mine mouth, or shaft, to a staith (wharf) on the river. Many records detailing the wages of wagon drivers refer to so many gates (or gaits) per day, i.e. they were paid for each return journey. The word was also used for underground transport, with an underground passage or level being referred to as a ‘gate’ or ‘gateway’.
The word obviously travelled because, as a former mining surveyor, i can advise that in modern South Wales collieries,
QUESTION Is the language spoken in the two Koreas still the same, or have changes taken place since the split into North and South?
roadways (tunnels) at either end of a mechanised coal face were known as the Main gate and the Tail gate. Lyn Pask, Blackwood, Gwent. in 1948, the 38th parallel split the democratic People’s republic of Korea (north Korea) and the republic of Korea (South Korea), both of which claim to be the government of the whole
of Korea, leading to a political, as well as cultural, split. The Korean peninsula was rich in regional dialects even before it was divided, with nine major dialects and many lesser ones. Most were mutually comprehensible, but decades of division has taken a toll on linguistic similarity. Since that time the language, of the north has tended to concentrate around the Pyongyang dialect, while the Seoul dialect has come to the fore in the South. in 2004, north and South Korea made an agreement to compile a ‘grand dictionary of the national language’ in the hope of restoring a unified Korean language after years of divergent evolution. Because of political turmoil, the project remains incomplete. in 2016, the committee estimated there was a 38 per cent difference in regular vocabulary, and 66 per cent difference in specialist terms used in north and South Korea. While north Korea is notoriously self-isolated, the South is a voracious consumer society that sucks in foreign products, concepts and culture. More than 25,000 foreign loanwords — mainly from English — are used by South Koreans. There is also a South KoreanEnglish hybrid known as ‘Konglish’ (English words used in a Korean context). Examples include ‘hand phone’ for mobile phone, ‘ open car’ for convertible and
‘eye-shopping’ for window shopping.
Mr J. Lin, Reading, Berks.