Vocabulary surprises

For some purposes, you can function fairly well with material in another language, so long as the topic stays within domains that are familiar to you — like linguistics, say. But when you wander into other domains, especially those that are closely tied to sociocultural conventions, things get messy, even if you stick to nouns; there’s just so much to know about cultural artifacts and customs, for example, and a huge vocabulary to acquire in these areas, in the names of animals and plants, etc.

I can deal pretty well with technical material in French, for example, but I’m easily stumped when it comes to artifacts, animals, plants, and the like. By way of illustration: my daughter gave me a big box of postcards on The Art of Instruction, with images of school materials from the 1950s, from mostly French but also some German sources. The German items have no text, but the French material (from Éditions Rossignol — the name is great; rossignol means ‘nightingale’) is heavy with text. For animals and plants, much of the vocabulary is technical teminology from zoology, anatomy, or botany, and that’s fascinating, but I can’t be expected to know these expressions. However, there are also the common names for animals and plants, and they contain many surprises.

That brings me to the tadpole.

African ice rats

In the May 4-10 2013 NewScientist, a piece on the “Rat with two faces”", beginning:

Beneath the snow of South Africa’s Drakensberg and Maluti mountains, African ice rats huddle together in burrows for warmth. When they reach the surface, though, it’s a different story.

On the -mageddon watch

Rob Partington points me to recent stories on the 17-year cicadas, under the heading swarmageddon (swarm + Armageddon) — a topical portmanteau. That led me to the preposterous shawarmageddon, involving the food shawarma.

Glass eels

In the NYT Sunday Review of 3/31/13, a piece by Akiko Busch (author of The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science) on “Why I Count Glass Eels”, about

half-hour increments spent on spring afternoons at the Fall Kill, a tributary of the Hudson River. In addition to pondering the notions of changeability and continuity that watching a stream flow into a river tend to prompt, I was also counting and weighing glass eels, tiny transparent fish only two or three inches long that enter the tributaries of the river each spring.

Which is to say, I was practicing something called citizen science, loosely defined as scientific research in which amateurs help experts gather data.

Here’s a single glass eel:

To come: some more about citizen science, then a bit about the compound glass eel, a fair amount on eels, and eventually eels as food, especially in unagi sushi.

Obamadon

This is so last week’s news, but Barack Obama has had a genus of (prehistoric) creatures named for him: Obamadon. Oh, those whimsical taxonomists!

Mammoth matters

My life is occasionally enlivened by mammuthiana — mammoth-oriented items (artifacts, books, humor, artistic representations, etc.) that are amusing, touching, scientifically interesting, whatever. To soothe my surgical days, Max Meredith Vasilatos has sent me one of these: a truly giant t-shirt (XL, but very very generous) depicting an impressive woolly mammoth. A photo of me modeling the clothing, with the tusks pointing suggestively towards my crotch (crotch not shown here):

The woolly mammoth is one of my totem animals (these days my primary one): see some history here., so the shirt was much appreciated.

(Another recent mammoth t-shirt here.)

 

Steadman’s Boids

In the NYT Science Times on Tuesday, an enthusiastic appreciation (“New Book Brings Joyful Splash of Plumage, Real and Imagined”, by James Gorman) of Ralph Steadman’s new book, on birds:

A book of birds, real and otherwise, hatched from the imagination of the artist Ralph Steadman, is bound to be a feast for the eyes. How wonderful to discover that it is a feast of words, as well.

… Mr. Steadman and his co-author, Ceri Levy, in “Extinct Boids” (being published Oct. 30 by Bloomsbury …) [have created] a thrilling book of surprised, silly, sullen, sad, extinct, real and unreal birds.

The book is focussed on extinct birds, with a considerable number of  imaginary birds plus a few living real birds.

Still more fun with initialisms

Today’s Bizarro returns to play with initialisms:

That would be Curly, Larry and Moe in the original, with Moe replaced by a chimerical genetically modified organism (GMO).

desmans

Heard last night on KQED, a BBC Science program, “Pyrenean desman: On the trail of Europe’s weirdest beast” by Rebecca Morelle. Odd creatures indeed, with a misleading name.

harriers

I’m now using 85¢ stamps in a recent Birds of Prey series – northern goshawk, peregrine falcon, golden eagle, osprey and northern harrier — to mail from the U.S. to Canada. In an unfortunately small-pixel image (the best I’ve been able to find):

The bird that caught my eye was the Northern Harrier (row by row, # 5, 3, 1, 4), so I wondered how harrier came to be used for a bird, a dog, and a cross-country runner.