centipedes

For years, Bruce Sterling has been blogging about political sex scandals around the world, calling them "centipedes" -- today, he's defined the term in a little essay explaining why they're so darned interesting, speaking sociopoliticotechnically.

Boing Boing 2008

Race organizer AEG, a subsidiary of Anschutz Co., says it encourages nonathletic fun through a costume contest and participants who run tied together as so-called centipedes.

San Francisco's New Race Rules: Run Naked, Not Drunk Geoffrey A. Fowler 2011

Many participants showed up in costumes; some raced as "centipedes," tied together.

15 Miles Is the Loneliest Race 2010

I named them "centipedes" because they are segmented, covert, and poisonous.

Boing Boing 2008

The woods abound with a number of dangerous reptiles, such as centipedes and scorpions.

Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales W. B. Cramp

Lieutenant Gordan made a rigid investigation of the racket caused by the "centipedes," but he failed to fasten the blame firmly on any one.

Frank Merriwell's Chums Burt L. Standish 1905

Barney and Hans declared over and over that they had been bitten by "centipedes," and showed the wounds.

Frank Merriwell's Chums Burt L. Standish 1905

But there was little encouragement in such thought -- no more than a man might feel in a cave of rattlesnakes or a pit of centipedes, for, crush them with his very bulk, nevertheless they would first sink their poison into him.

CHAPTER XIV 2010

Yet have I read the Hawaiian bible the missionaries translated to us, and there have I read that your Big Man of the Beginning made the earth and sky and sun and moon and stars, and all manner of animals from horses to cockroaches and from centipedes and mosquitoes to sea lice and jellyfish, and man and woman and everything, and all in six days.

THE WATER BABY 2010

He would have possessed a larger sum, had he not, on occasion, conservatively played che fa and fan tan, and had he not, for a twelve-month, toiled among the centipedes and scorpions of the stifling cane-fields in the semi-dream of a continuous opium debauch.

THE TEARS OF AH KIM 2010