Fields

 

Fields

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

A field of honour can be a battlefield or the setting for a duel, but ‘having a field day’ was originally a British military expression from about 1747 describing a day of manoeuvres or inspections out of doors rather than in indoor facilities. Soldiers would leave their barracks to practice battle drills and tactics. It was used in the Royal Navy to describe a day of ‘deep cleaning’ a ship.

Now it means deriving a good deal of pleasure, sometimes at the expense of others.

One may have a field day by playing the field, which can be fun for the principal player but not necessarily for the other participants. The others might not consider themselves ‘on a level playing field,’ where everyone has an equal chance of success, and of becoming ‘the best in field.’  

‘The Killing Fields’ is the term for mass grave sites in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge, under the control of Pol Pot, committed the genocide of between 1.3 and 3 million people between 1975 and 1979, about a quarter of Cambodia’s population at the time. 

Anyone who posed a threat, real or imagined, was either executed or worked to death. Intellectual and professional people, religious groups, including Christians, Buddhists and Muslims, ethnic Vietnamese and Thai groups, were considered an obstacle to the creation of a Communist agrarian civilisation, a so-called ‘classless’ society.

Ultimately, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, and overwhelmed the Khmer Rouge. Subsequent decades were spent bringing the perpetrators to justice, some of whom died before the conclusion of the trials, which ran from 2006 to 2022.