Miss Lemon, did you not grow up with Leap Day William? He lives in the Mariana Trench? He emerges every four years to trade children’s tears for candy?
Throwing it back to 1958, when Museum staff were installing models for the Life on the Forest Floor diorama. A forest floor is a busy place, full of decomposing debris and hungry millipedes, beetles, and weevils. The diorama shows a cross section, at 24 times its actual size! To create this scene, Museum artists studied specimens under a microscope and made models using clay, wax, wire, shellac, and even shoe polish. You can see this diorama today in the Hall of North American Forests.
Family Mormyridae, the aptly-named elephant fishes, are pretty fuckin’ cool. Not only do some of them look like that, but they also possess electric organs in their caudal peduncle which are used for not only prey detection, but also navigation and communication. They’ve also got a high;y developed central nervous system and a keen sense of hearing. With small eyes and thick skin, these nocturnal foragers use their long, proboscis-like snouts to forage in muddy lakes and rivers in Africa.
So it occurred to me that ‘grawlix’ is sort of an obscure and specialized word, but what I didn’t know until I was googling around just now is that it was actually invented by cartoonist Mort Walker in his 1980 book The Lexicon of Comicana, in which he categorizes (and invents terminology for) all kinds of visual cues and shorthand commonly used in comics
In other news, this is now right up there with The Meaning of Liff as ‘books of made up words I desperately need to own”
