A palisade, sometimes called a stakewall or a paling, is typically a fence or defensive wall made from iron or wooden stakes, or tree trunks, and used as a defensive structure or enclosure.  Palisades can form a stockade.  Typical construction consisted of small or mid-sized tree trunks aligned vertically, with no free space in between.  The trunks were sharpened or pointed at the top, and were driven into the ground and sometimes reinforced with additional construction.  The height of a palisade ranged from around a metre to as high as 3–4 m.  As a defensive structure, palisades were often used in conjunction with earthworks.  Palisades were an excellent option for small forts or other hastily constructed fortifications.  Since they were made of wood, they could often be quickly and easily built from readily available materials.  They proved to be effective protection for short-term conflicts and were an effective deterrent against small forces.  However, because they were wooden constructions they were also vulnerable to fire and siege weapons.  Often, a palisade would be constructed around a castle as a temporary wall until a permanent stone wall could be erected.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palisade 

In fortification architecture, a rampart is a length of bank or wall forming part of the defensive boundary of a castle, hillfort, settlement or other fortified site.  It is usually broad-topped and made of excavated earth and/or masonry.  Many types of early fortification, from prehistory through to the Early Middle Ages, employed earth ramparts usually in combination with external ditches to defend the outer perimeter of a fortified site or settlement.  Hillforts, ringforts or "raths" and ringworks all made use of ditch and rampart defences, and they are the characteristic feature of circular ramparts.  The ramparts could be reinforced and raised in height by the use of palisades.  This type of arrangement was a feature of the motte and bailey castle of northern Europe in the early medieval period.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_(fortification)  

In Britain, it’s now common to hear the abbreviated forms chocka (or chocker), which are both from World War Two services’ slang, and in Australia the closely related chockers.  Chock here is the same word as in chock-full, jam-packed full or filled to overflowing.   One meaning of chock in the nineteenth century was of two things pressed so tightly against each other that they can’t move.  This led to the nautical term that’s the direct origin of the phrase.  Block refers to the pulley blocks of the tackle used for various hauling jobs on board ship.  These worked in pairs, with the ropes threaded between them.  When the men hauling tackle ropes had hoisted the load as far as it would go, the two pulley blocks touched and could move no further.  They were then said to be chock-a-block, or crammed together.  The origin of chock is complicated and not altogether understood.   It’s clear that there has been some cross-fertilisation between it and chock in the sense of a lump of wood used as a wedge to stop something moving. That’s closely enough related to our sense to make it seem as though it might be the same word.  But the experts think that chock in chock-a-block actually came from chock-full.  That has been around at least since 1400.  It comes from a different source, the verb chokken, as in the Middle English phrase chokken togeder, crammed together.  This in turn may be from an Old French verb choquier, to collide or thrust.  One of the problems of working out the origin has been that chock-full has appeared in several different spellings—including chuck-full and choke-full reflecting users’ uncertainty about where it comes from.  https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-cho3.htm 

Eunoia, at six letters long, is the shortest word in the English language that contains all five main vowels.  'Eunoia' means "beautiful thinking" or denotes a normal mental state.  https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/shortest-word-in-the-english-language-that-contains-all-five-main-vowels  See also https://www.englishbix.com/english-words-with-all-vowels/ 

A little nightly drink may help keep you healthy when it comes to bacterial pathogens.  Washing your hands also helps and, for the millions of people still at risk of cholera, clean drinking water is what is really needed.  In the modern context, clean water beats alcohol as a cure for nearly every disease alcohol might remedy.  If wine, beer, gin and other alcohols are good for pathogen prevention, their influence on the trajectory of history may have been great and varied, including but not exclusive to an effect on the origins of agriculture.  Maybe the ages of exploration would not have happened without beer, wine and other drinks.  Water on ships tended to become contaminated with pathogens.  Beer and wine, on the other hand, remained “pure.”  Perhaps those cultures that succeeded in exploration did so through the aid of alcohol.  Rob Dunn   https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/strong-medicine-drinking-wine-and-beer-can-help-save-you-from-cholera-montezumas-revenge-e-coli-and-ulcers1/ 

Cecile Pineda, Latina Writer Known for a Novel of Identity, Dies at 89  August 17, 2022  Cecile Pineda was born on Sept. 24, 1932, in Harlem.  Her mother was an illustrator, and her father, who had entered the United States under an assumed name at 16, was a linguist.  Despite her father’s surname, she wrote in “Entry Without Inspection,” she grew up speaking French and not Spanish in her household, along with English.  She studied theater at Barnard College, where The Barnard Bulletin praised her performances in Molière’s “The Physician in Spite of Himself” and other plays.  After she graduated in 1954, she headed to the West Coast, eventually settling in San Francisco with her husband, Felix Leneman.  A 1965 article in The San Francisco Examiner quoted her as speaking out in support of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a boundary-pushing theater company, whose performance permit had been canceled by the city after one of its shows was deemed indecent.  https://aoadailynews.com/cecile-pineda-latina-writer-known-for-a-novel-of-identity-dies-at-89/ 

"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?"  "That's against the law!"  "Oh.  Of course."  -  Ray Bradbury, science-fiction writer (22 Aug 1920-2012) 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2554  August 22, 2022