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Chris -- 2025-05-10
Near-homophones in AmEnglish, but since fizzle usually means to “end weakly”, not particularly appropriate for nuclear reactions. I can’t help thinking there may be some eggcornish imagery suggested by those spherical black bombs with fizzing fuses often carried by black-coated anarchists or sundry talking animals in the innocent cartoons of the past.
Simple, detonate around the hydrogen bomb, some small sub kiloton, suitcase bombs, of fizzle material.
They have developed enough fizzle material for eight to ten nuclear weapons.
In 1990 Saddam had a nuclear weapon sans the fizzle material.
Another interesting variant which can certainly give your fingers a nasty jab:
The probability is greater that thistle material in the form of either highly enriched Uranium or Plutonium, of which there are hundreds of …
... especially in furnishing materials to other nations is scary, and will actually lead to some detonation of some thistle material. ...
They don’t have the thistle material yet that’s absolutely right. And they’re enriching uranium, a lot of it, which may allow them to …
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Thistle material? You mean the Scots have the bomb? Heaven hae mercy on oor puir erth!
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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A great find—two great finds, really. The fizzing fuses reading works for me—and I like the way the reshaping changes the register of the word, turning it from something that sounds terribly technological into something that’s as likely to evoke Pepto-Bismol as anything else. And it wouldn’t even have occurred to me to go looking for fissile>>thistle—amazing.
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Excellent find. I like the variant “fizzable” because it seems to be a better substitute for fissile (fissionable) ...
Uranium secretly flown out of Iraq – Article Comments – View topic …The removal of 550 metric tons of yellowcake — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment … Just a little to-be-processed fizzable material. ...
neighbors.denverpost.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=9796209 – Cached
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