Martial Arts

Placing To Privatization (Money)

Placing When a stockbroking firm, or several of them, have a large line of shares to sell, and sell it directly to institutional investors, it is known as a placing. As a private investor, you won’t get the benefit of this – only in an indirect sense, as those shares often go into pension and […]

Takeover To Turnover (Money)

Takeover This is when company A decides to buy up company B. Corporate financiers, lawyers and mergers and acquisitions teams work on these kind of deals (see Corporate Finance, Due Diligence, Investment Bank, Mergers & Acquisitions). Takeover Panel A select committee of high-level bankers and industrialists whose executive may be consulted by companies that are […]

Africa and African America (Martial Arts)

Although many of the societies of Africa developed in close proximity to Egyptian civilization, with its highly developed fighting arts and rivalry with other “superpowers” such as the Hittites, their martial systems developed in relative isolation from Middle Eastern combat disciplines. Rather, the martial arts, particularly those of the sub-Saharan Africans, belong to a world […]

Aikido (Martial Arts)

Aikido is a modern martial system of Japanese derivation, developed by founder Ueshiba Morihei (1883-1969) over the course of his lifetime. Aikido employs the redirection of an attacker’s energy (or ki) into a variety of holds, locks, and projections, and is probably best known for an exclusive focus on defensive maneuvers and for its unique […]

Animal and Imitative Systems in Chinese Martial Arts

Very early, the Chinese observed the characteristics of their natural environment, including the wildlife and, as early as 300 b.c., there is evidence in the writings of Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu) that they were imitating animal movements (birds and bears) as a form of exercise. The doctor Hua Tuo is said to have developed the Five Animal […]

Archery, Japanese (Martial Arts)

The practice of kyudo or Japanese Archery is traced to two roots: ceremonial archery associated with Shinto and combative archery developing from warfare and hunting. Kyudo has been called the earliest martial sport of Japan, as the warrior and noble classes used it for recreational hunting. Kyudo was also considered to be one of the […]

Baguazhang (Pa Kua Ch'uan) (Martial Arts)

Of the four internal martial arts of China, the most distinctive appearing is baguazhang. The name means “eight-trigram palm,” in reference to the bagua (eight-trigram) pattern used in Chinese philosophy, magic, and fortune telling. Part of the training in baguazhang is walking a circle while practicing certain moves, and this walking a circle gives the […]

Boxing, Chinese (Martial Arts)

Chinese boxing is a versatile form of bare-handed fighting, variously combining strikes with the hands, kicks and other leg maneuvers, grappling, holds, and throws. Piecing together the scattered passages in ancient writings, one can reasonably conclude that the origins of Chinese boxing go back as far as the Xia dynasty (twenty-first to sixteenth centuries b.c.), […]

Boxing, Chinese Shaolin Styles (Martial Arts)

  By : Richard Mooney Chinese boxing systems have commonly been understood in terms of dichotomies: hard versus soft, external versus internal, northern versus southern, Wudang versus Shaolin. Using these folk categories, the “Shaolin tradition” has been understood as covering those systems that are hard and external as distinct from soft and internal. The Shaolin arts […]

Boxing, European (Martial Arts)

Boxing is an ancient martial art combining hand strikes, controlled aggression, evasiveness, and bone-crushing force. The term boxing derives from the box shape of the closed hand, or fist, which in Latin is pugnus (hence the alternative terms pugilism and fisticuffs). Pungent, sharing the Indo-European root, describes the art rightly executed: “sharply painful, having a […]

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