sweet potato Food plant ( Ipomoea batatas', family Convolvulaceae) native to tropical America and widely cultivated in tropical and warm temperate climates. Botanically unrelated to the white, or Irish, potato or the yam, sweet potatoes are oblong or pointed oval, tuberous roots. Skin colour ranges from light buff to brown to purplish red; the pulp may be white (highest in starch) to orange (also high in carotene) to purple. Long, trailing plant stems bear funnel-shaped flowers tinged with pink or rose violet. Sweet potatoes are served baked or mashed and used as pie fill¬ ing.
sweet William Garden plant ( Dianthus barbatus) in the pink family, grown for its clusters of small, brightly coloured flowers. It usually grows as a biennial, with seed sown the first year producing spring¬ flowering plants the second year. The plants grow about 2 ft (60 cm) high and produce numerous flowers with fringed petals in white, pink, or rose to violet, sometimes also bicoloured.
sweetbrier or eglantine Small, prickly wild rose ( Rosa eglanteria, or R. rubiginosa ) with fragrant foli¬ age and numerous small pink flow¬ ers, native to Europe and western Asia. Widely naturalized in North America, it grows along roadsides and in pastures from eastern Canada southwest to Tennessee and Kansas. The shrub form, which can grow 6 ft (2 m) high, is useful for screening out traffic noise and beautifying highways.
Sweyn \'svan\ I or Sweyn Forkbeard (d. Feb. 3, 1014, Gainsbor¬ ough, Lincolnshire, Eng.) King of Denmark (c. 987-1014) and Viking conqueror of Norway and England. He rebelled against his father, Harald Bluetooth (987), chasing him from Denmark. With Swedish and Norwe¬ gian allies, he defeated Olaf I Tryggvason (c. 1000), becoming virtual ruler of Norway. Sweyn led raids on England in 1003-04 and became king after a successful military campaign in 1013, forcing Ethelred II into exile. Nor¬ way reverted to Norwegian rule after Sweyn’s death, but the Anglo- Danish empire continued under his son Canute the Great.
swift Any of about 75 species (family Apodidae) of birds found almost worldwide. The fastest of small birds, swifts can fly at 70 mph (110 kph). They are 4-9 in. (9-23 cm) long and have long wings, a chunky dark body, a broad head, and a short, wide, slightly curved bill. The tail may be short or long and deeply forked. Swifts capture insects, drink, bathe, and sometimes mate on the wing. The feet, incapable of perching, are used to cling to vertical surfaces. Swifts use their sticky saliva to glue the nest to a cave wall, the inside of a chimney, or a tree hollow.
Swift, Gustavus Franklin (b. June 24, 1839, West Sandwich, Mass., U.S.—d. March 29, 1903, Chicago, Ill.) U.S. meatpacker. Swift started as a butcher’s helper at age 14 and by 1859 was operating his own butcher shop. In 1872 he became the partner of a Boston meat dealer; three years later he transferred their cattle-buying operations to Chicago. Believing profits would increase if fresh meat rather than live cattle were shipped from Chicago, he had a refrigerator car designed and made his first ship¬ ment in 1877. With his brother he formed Swift & Co. (1885). During his 18 years as president, its capitalization rose from $300,000 to $25 mil¬ lion. Like his rivals Philip D. Armour and Nelson Morris, Swift was a leader in byproduct utilization, entering related businesses such as soap, glue, fertilizer, and margarine.
Swift, Jonathan (b. Nov. 30, 1667, Dublin, Ire.—d. Oct. 19, 1745, Dublin) Irish author, the foremost prose satirist in English. He was a stu¬ dent at Dublin’s Trinity College during the anti-Catholic Revolution of 1688 in England. Irish Catholic reaction in Dublin led Swift, a Protestant, to seek security in England, where he spent various intervals before 1714. He was ordained an Anglican priest in 1695. His first major work, A Tale of
a Tub (1704), comprises three satiric sketches on religion and learning; he also became known for religious and political essays and impish pam¬ phlets written under the name “Isaac Bickerstaff.” Reluctantly setting aside his loyalty to the Whigs, in 1710 he became the leading writer for the Tories because of their support for the established church. Journal to Stella (written 1710-13) consists of letters recording his reactions to the changing world. As a reward for writ¬ ing and editing Tory publications, in 1713 he was awarded the deanery of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. He spent nearly all the rest of his life in Ireland, where he devoted himself to exposing English wrongheadedness and their unfair treatment of the Irish.
His ironic tract “A Modest Proposal”
(1729) proposes ameliorating Irish poverty by butchering children and selling them as food to wealthy English landlords. His famously brilliant and bitter satire Gulliver’s Travels (1126), ostensibly the story of its hero’s encounters with various races and societies in remote regions, reflects Swift’s vision of humanity’s ambiguous position between bestiality and rationality.
swimming In recreation and sports, the propulsion of the body through water by combined arm and leg motions. Swimming is popular as an all- around fitness routine and as a competitive sport. It has been included in the modern Olympic Games since their inception in 1896. Events include freestyle (crawl-stroke) races at distances of 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, and 1,500 m; backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly races at 100 and 200 m; individual medley races at 200 and 400 m; freestyle relays, 4 x 100 m and 4 x 200 m; and the medley relay, 4 x 100 m. Long-distance swim¬ ming competitions, usually of 15-37 mi (24-59 km), are generally held on lakes and inland waters.
swimming cat See Turkish van cat
Swinburne, Algernon Charles (b. April 5,1837, London, Eng.—d. April 10, 1909, Putney, London)
English poet and critic. After attend¬ ing Eton and the University of Oxford, Swinburne lived on an allowance from his father. His verse drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865) first showed his lyric powers. Poems and Ballads (1866), containing some of his best work, displays his pagan¬ ism and masochism and provoked controversy; a second series (1878) was less hectic and sensual. His verse is marked by emphatic rhythms, much alliteration and inter¬ nal rhyme, and lush subject matter.
His health collapsed in 1879 and he spent his last 30 years under a friend’s guardianship. His early poetry is noted for innovations in prosody, but his later poetry is con¬ sidered less important. Among his outstanding critical writings are Essays and Studies (1875) and monographs on William Shakespeare (1880), Victor Hugo (1886), and Ben Jonson (1889).
swine fever See hog cholera
swing Jazz played with a steady beat using the harmonic structure of popular songs and the blues as the basis for improvisations and arrange¬ ments. The popular music of the U.S. from about 1930 to 1945 (years sometimes called the swing era), swing is characterized by syncopated rhythmic momentum with equal stress accorded to the four beats of a measure. Larger jazz bands required some arranged material, and Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie were the primary innovators
Jonathan Swift, detail of an oil painting by Charles Jervas; in the National Por¬ trait Gallery, London.
COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY,
LONDON
Algernon Charles Swinburne, waterco¬ lour by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1862; in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
COURTESY OF THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM, CAMBRIDGE
© 2006 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Swiss chard ► Sydney I 1855
of big-band swing. In smaller ensembles, improvised instrumental solos generally follow a rendering of the melody.
Swiss chard See chard
switching theory Theory of circuits made up of ideal digital devices, including their structure, behaviour, and design. It incorporates Boolean logic (see Boolean algebra), a basic component of modern digital switch¬ ing systems. Switching is essential to telephone, telegraph, data process¬ ing, and other technologies in which it is necessary to make rapid decisions about routing information. See also queuing theory.