Arena: A vast outdoor arena rigged with Panem's high-tech TV cameras as well as traps and challenges to test the tributes fighting each other to the death in the Hunger Games. An arena may contain anything from "a burning desert to a frozen wasteland." After the Hunger Games, the arenas become popular tourist destinations for Capitol citizens.
It is time for an addition to the Gawker glossary. We need an abusive term-a new one-for banker. The financial slang of the last twenty years has been begrudgingly admiring. Big swinging dick carries an undertone of arrogance; but also swaggering status. Any respect has been lost of course in a few months of bank collapses and the last few sickening days on the stockmarket. Bankers now draw the opprobrium they did during the Depression. So it would be timely to revive a word from the 1930s used to describe a hybrid of banker and gangster: the bankster. (After the jump, a passage from Ron Chernow's book, the Death of the Banker.)
