Daedalus and Its Use in Modern English
Daedalus, in the form of "daedalean", can be an adjective meaning "complicated" or "convoluted". The term derives its etymology from the Daedalus Labyrinth or "complicated maze".
In the video game Gray Matter a magicians club is named Daedalus, with a winged statue in the lobby in possible relation to him being an icon of magic, science or both.
The name Daedalus is used in James Joyce's novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, though spelled differently in the last name of the character Stephen Dedalus.
Philip Roth titled the second chapter of his novel "The Ghost Writer" Nathan Dedalus, after the novel's young protagonist Nathan Zuckerman.
Musician Joe Jackson wrote a song Fugue2- Song of Daedalus.
Five ships and a number of shore establishments of the (British) Royal Navy have borne the name HMS Daedalus.
Daedalus is the name of a major character in the game Deus Ex and the anime Ergo Proxy. Daedalus is the name of a boss that protects Giruvegan in the game Final Fantasy XII.
In the Canadian-American military science fiction series Stargate SG-1 and later in the series Stargate Atlantis, Daedalus is the name for the second interstellar and first intergalactic spaceship built by Homeworld Security.
Daedalus is the name of the human/alien hybrid mastermind behind all the (Chimeran) actions and strategies in Insomniac's 2008 game, Resistance 2.
Daedalus appears in the game God of War III voiced by Malcolm McDowell. He is chained up inside his labyrinth. He kills himself after learning that Kratos killed Icarus (who apparently survived his tumble to the sea) in God of War II.
There is a character in the Saint Seiya comic and anime called Cepheus Daedalus, a silver saint from Argentina, master of Andromeda Shun and Chameleon June.
In the Percy Jackson & the Olympians book The Battle of the Labyrinth, Daedalus is the enigmatic Quintus (Latin which means 5 or fifth), and has preserved himself since antiquity by placing his animus, his life force, into an automaton, an idea pioneered by his nephew Perdix. He invented the Labyrinth, the main setting of the book, and has a pet Hell Hound called Mrs. O'Leary.
The American rock band Thrice has written two songs about Daedalus. One featured in the album The Artist in the Ambulance called "The melting point of wax." The other featured in The Alchemy Index Vols. III & IV called "Daedalus". Both are based on the myth of Daedalus and Icarus flying on wax wings.
Daedalus had a crossbow item named after him in DotA, hence, Dota 2, too uses his name as an item.
The Harry Potter character Dedalus Diggle is named after Daedalus.
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Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or english:
“I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To be born in a new country one has to die in the motherland.”
—Irina Mogilevskaya, Russian student. “Immigrating to the U.S.,” student paper in an English as a Second Language class, Hunter College, 1995.