I’m sure you have probably heard about the recent suspected terrorist attacks in Jakarta, Indonesia. Here in Indonesia it is all we have been seeing in the news for the last few days. There was an interesting piece of vocabulary in an article about it on Reuters.com:
Indonesia police: bomb attacks have JI hallmark
‘Hallmark’ is seen later in the article, too. Sidney Jones is quoted as saying:
“The most important hallmark is the suicide bombing as a method of attack and also the targeting of iconic Western symbols, both of those are associated more with Noordin than with mainstream Jemaah Islamiah,”
What’s a hallmark? As usual, the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary has an accurate definition. I also find it interesting that one of the examples they provide is also related to terrorist attacks. I guess is it quite a common thing to see in the news nowadays.
hallmark (CHARACTERISTIC)
noun [C]
a typical characteristic or feature of a person or thing:
Simplicity is a hallmark of this design.
This explosion bears/has all the hallmarks of (= is extremely likely to have been) a terrorist attack.
The next interesting piece of vocabulary is in the second half of the article where the author mentions that speculation is ‘rife‘ over the identity of the bombers. ‘Rife’ means that something is very common or that there is a lot of it and it’s usually used in relation to something bad or negative in some way. We could say that Swine Flu is ‘rife’ in the U.K. at the moment, for example.
Stay safe, everyone.