Roman army of the mid-Republic x 700m = ca. 50 hectares). Along the perimeter, a ditch ("fossa") would be excavated, and the spoil used to build an earthen rampart ("agger") on the inside of the ditch. On top of the rampart was erected a palisade ("vallum") of cross-hatched wooden stakes with sharpened points. Within this precinct, a standard, elaborate plan was used to allocate space, in a pre-set pattern, for the tents of each of the various components of the army: officers, legionary infantry (split into "hastati", "principes" and "triarii") and legionary cavalry, Italian allied infantry and cavalry, "extraordinarii" and non-Italian allies. The idea was
Wooden language George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four often mirrors and satirizes wooden language. Wooden language Wooden language is language that uses vague, ambiguous, abstract or pompous words in order to divert attention from the salient issues. The French scholar Françoise Thom identified four characteristics of wooden language: abstraction and the avoidance of the concrete, tautologies, bad metaphors, and Manichaeism that divides the world into good and evil. It originally referred to wording imposed by the Soviet Union. The phrase is a literal translation of the French expression "". The French phrase became widely used during the 1970s and 1980s, arriving in the