Day 143: Science is about asking the Seven Questions: "what, why, how, when, where, how much" and to some extent even "who." Any one of these may lead into another, and sometimes those of us who pursue science find ourselves following Alice down the rabbit hole until we are so engrossed in our discoveries that we temporarily lose track of where we began. Take the lichen Icmadophila ericetorum, for example. It goes by the common name of "faerie/fairy-barf," and as I was puzzling over the sophomoric humour of the appellation, it occurred to me that "barf" was a word I had not encountered until I had reached adulthood. I thought this rather odd since children universally seem to know all sorts of words for disgusting substances, yet "barf" had not been in the lexicon of my school-aged peers. That the word was probably imitative of the sound made by someone retching I had no doubt, but when had it entered the English vocabulary? My three-volume dictionary printed in 1966 did not list it, so I turned to Google. Indeed, it was first recorded some time between 1955-60 as a verb and advanced to an acceptable noun in 1960. And you thought this post was going to be about the lichen, didn't you?
365Caws is now in its 16th year of publication. If I am unable to post daily, I hope readers who love the natural world and fiberarts will seize those days to read the older material. Remember that this has been my journey as well, so you may find errors in my identifications of plants. I have tried to correct them as I discover them. Likewise, I have refined fiberarts techniques and have adjusted recipes, so search by tags to find the most current information. And thank you for following me!
Friday, March 5, 2021
Icmadophila Ericetorum
Labels:
barf,
etymology,
Icmadophila ericetorum,
word origin
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