Reportedly, Norway lost 60% of its population in six months in 1349 due to the bubonic plague.
Norway was deeply involved in the European trade, which accelerated the rapid spread of the Black Death. The (Eskimo-like) Sami population were less affected due their almost completely different diet and lifestyle. The sudden drop in population caused Norway to eventually lose its independence.
This article says that the population decline in Norway began decades before the Black Death, due to crop failures and famine:
I never realized that the scientific name and common name were the same, there! That’s cool. I wonder if there are any other modern, extant species that are commonly referred to by their full scientific name, genus and species.
Oh wow, that was an old post
Perhaps Homo sapiens?
But the common name is humans.
Gorilla is the common name of the animal Gorilla gorilla gorilla but no one calls it by the full scientific name.
People routinely say “Boa constrictor” out loud, though.
I can’t think of one, but I’ll take this moment to remember the longtime Doper Pseudotriton ruber ruber (red salamander).
Carry on.
Similarly, the American bison is bison bison which isn’t quite as compelling as Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
I just read that Ayn Rand was living in Hollywood, trying to succeed as a writer, she lived at the Hollywood Studio Club, a residence for women who were trying to break into movies. She often had trouble paying the rent. Thel women of the club pooled their money to help out the “neediest” of those living there and decided that Rand needed it most. She got $50.
She spent it on lingerie.
That’s pretty Randy-an.
Sorry.
Ann Morgan Guilbert was 4½ years older than Renee Taylor, who played her daughter on The Nannie. Also, surprisingly (to me, anyway), she wasn’t Jewish.
On Golden Girls, Estelle Getty played the mother of Bea Arthur, although she was actually a year younger than her.
TIL that Alligator Mississippiensis is the scientific name for the American alligator.
And one of my favorite scientific names is Lama glama, the Llama.
She was eight years older than Mary Tyler Moore on The Dick Van Dyke Show, even though they were supposed to be contemporaries.
OTOH, Moore was 24 when the show started, even though the character had been married for 10 years. The difference between her age and Van Dyke’s, who was 11 years older, was so obvious that they had a later episode establishing that she had been 17 when they married and they needed to get remarried to be legal.
That’s right: Ritchie was a bastard.
And Dick was a…different times, man!
No he wasn’t!
Alan Brady was.
(There are so many ways of ending that sentence. I chose one.)
Learned this listening to A Way With Words on NPR last night.
According to Webster’s dictionary (and others), the word opossum can be pronounced with or without the o.
Notably this is separate from the word possum.
Right now I’m in New Zealand. There is a fur-bearing animal here called a possum, specifically a common brushtail possum. It was introduced to this country from Australia and is considered an invasive pest.
According to Wikipedia:
The common name “(o)possum” for various Phalangeriformes species derives from the creatures’ resemblance to the opossums of the Americas (the term comes from Powhatan language aposoum “white animal”, from Proto-Algonquian *wa·p-aʔɬemwa “white dog”).
For no particular reason that I can figure out I have, over the last couple of years, got to have quite a few people who are or were involved in bell ringing - that is to say, the ringing of church bells. And from one of these people I recently learned that there is a specific term for the leader of a team of bell ringers: The Tower Captain. Isn’t that great?
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