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?
No comments:
Post a Comment