I’m halfway through Annihilation (thanks, bulbul!), and one of the pleasures of the book is discovering phrases hitherto unknown to me that are attractive as linguistic items and interesting as real-world phenomena; so far they’re all biological, because the narrator of the book is a biologist:
Interestingly, a velvet ant is not an ant, a sea oat is not an oat, and a cypress knee is not a knee. Natural language is not transparent!
Addendum. sugar glider
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
This reminds me of that bit on The Wire about how Baltimore lake trout is neither trout, nor from a lake – just like how New York egg creams contain neither eggs nor cream.
I knew sea oats and cyprus knees because I’ve seen them. Velvet ants are new to me.
The sea is a pretty good place to find things that are not what they are. Sea horses, of course. Sea urchins, sea anemones, sea cucumbers. Sea cows. And sea bees, of course.
—Charles KIngsley
Hmm. Looking at the article about velvet ants, and particularly at the pictures, it must have been one of them that stung me on the big toe once while I was walking to work in sandals. Although I usually recover quite quickly from the pain of a sting of an ordinary wasp or bee this one was so painful and long-lasting the I spent most of the day with my foot in a bowl of cold water.
I’ve heard of velvet ants, and I remember reading that they had a painful sting. But I just looked it up, and it says somewhere that on the Schmidt pain index they rate a mere 1.8, lower than hornets, yellow-jackets,or honeybees (all 2.0).
Of course, I myself would have rated a hornet a good deal higher than a honeybee. And I suppose some velvet ants have a more painful sting than others.
I don’t have the patience at the moment to remind myself how to insert a link; it’s been a while since I did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_sting_pain_index
More Kingsley:
So I read of cypress knees, and the now-doubted theory that they exist to provide extra oxygen to the roots, which are sitting in deoxygenated swampy water, and was led from there to mangroves, which actually do have upward extensions of their roots for that very purpose. And not only are mangroves a fine example of a paraphyletic group, and of convergent evolution to boot, but they have a fine etymology, from Portuguese mangue < Spanish mangle, and there apparently Guaraní in origin.
Woodchucks can, in fact, chuck wood. The experiment has been done and published in the Annals of Improbable Research: when they’re hungry enough, they chuck wood at about 1 cm³/h if I remember the number right.
Let me guess: the pain index was developed by the kind of doctor that tells you “it doesn’t hurt, it’s like a mosquito sting”.
Polyphyletic. Paraphyletic means they have just one origin, but not all descendants of that last common ancestor are considered members of the group.
Seine salmon …. used condoms ….
Upon seeing the MP6 for the first time, Enrico Piaggio exclaimed: “Sembra una vespa!” (“It resembles a wasp!”) Piaggio effectively named his new scooter on the spot.
Holy Roman Empire.
“Ce corps qui s’appelait et qui s’appelle encore le saint empire romain n’était en aucune manière ni saint, ni romain, ni empire.”
John Cowan (2015): “mangroves … from Portuguese mangue < Spanish mangle, and there apparently Guaraní in origin.”
The “-grove” part is probably folk etymology within English.
“Guaraní” must have been a mistake; English and Spanish dictionaries all point to an origin of the word either specifically in Taíno, or more generally some Arawakan or Cariban language. Those are Caribbean coastal/island languages, Guaraní is not.