The Poetry of Common Names
I love common names.
I’m not talking about human names (though I confess a fondness for the name Bob, used as a suffix) but the common names of species. The non-Latin ones. I love flipping through seed catalogs and seeing “Good Mother Stallard Beans” and “Moon and Stars Watermelon.” I was utterly delighted to find out that one of the slime molds lurking in my mulch is known as “Wolf’s Milk,” and when I discovered that a type of gelatinous fungus was known in Norway as “Troll Butter” I had to go sit down and fan myself for a few minutes.
Common names are awesome. They are little fragments of poetry. They tell us that somewhere, at some point, somebody lived right up next to this thing and saw it often enough to give it a name.
In North Carolina where I live, we have insects called Ebony Jewelwings, Red Velvet Mites, and Eastern Pondhawks.
There are native orchids called Rattlesnake Plantain, Crippled Crane-fly, Green Fly and Water Spider. I have been hunting for years for Rabbit Tobacco, with no success, but I manage to grow Sourwood, Little Brown Jug, and Duck Potato, and if only my pond were large enough, I would plant Flying Hedgehogs in a heartbeat.
Endangered plants get no love, compared to animals. People who will rally behind snail darters and endangered mussels get a bit vague when plants come up. (Except orchids. If you’re going to be an endangered plant, try to be an orchid.) But I can’t think that the world wouldn’t be a sadder place if we lost Raven’s Seedbox, Florida Adder’s-Mouth, Carolina Grass-of-Parnassus, Spiked Medusa and Bigleaf Scurfpea.
Seriously, Scurfpea. What is not to love about the name “Scurfpea”? It sounds like a My Little Pony from the wrong side of the tracks.
Sigh. I worry that as we lose contact with nature, among all the other things we lose (and they are many and important) perhaps we’re also losing a store of weird, lyrical little names. And that’s sad. It’s hard to get excited about Stenathium leimanthoides, but I think we could all agree that the Pinebarren Death-Camas is pretty damn awesome.
Maybe not as awesome as Scurfpea, but you can’t have everything.
(via slipstreamborne)
We Are Become Pals, THE BOOK is here!!!!!!
I am very excited and proud of this book. Joey (one of my favorite writers) wrote an absolutely beautiful book and I drew pictures in it.
The book is about best friends.
The first half is here to readThe hardcover book, with extra chapters and art is here to buy
(via kateordie)
what’s a girl gotta do to illegally download a neuroscience textbook around here
the internet is WORTHLESS
This is a summary of college only using two pictures; expensive as hell.
That’s my Sociology “book”. In fact what it is is a piece of paper with codes written on it to allow me to access an electronic version of a book. I was told by my professor that I could not buy any other paperback version, or use another code, so I was left with no option other than buying a piece of paper for over $200. Best part about all this is my professor wrote the books; there’s something hilariously sadistic about that. So I pretty much doled out $200 for a current edition of an online textbook that is no different than an older, paperback edition of the same book for $5; yeah, I checked. My mistake for listening to my professor.
This is why we download.
Alternatives to buying overpriced textbooks
BookFinder
(via iwilleatyourenglish)
there’s a separate version of my psych textbook for canadian students are canadian minds really that different??
what’s a girl gotta do to illegally download a neuroscience textbook around here
PSA
Because I remember how shitty textbook prices were in college, here are some other options for my followers.
(via witchydarling)
Significant numbers of labiaplasties on girls under 18 years of age are reported in medical literature with publications dwelling specifically on labial reductions in adolescents for hypertrophy (excessive labial size) or asymmetry of the labia minora. In a recent observational study of referral…
(via the-noravirus)
