This is a new fact: recently published research shows that platypus fur glows under black lights. How cool is that?!?
According to new research published in the scientific journal Mammalia, platypuses glow because of biofluorescence.
Biofluorescence is when a living organism absorbs short wavelengths of light — from the sun or another light source — and re-emits them as longer wavelengths of light.
Biofluorescence is different from bioluminescence. That’s when a living organism, like a firefly, can create light from its body, rather than absorbing that light from another source.
They might have Finnish ancestry; Petri is a common Finnish name and is derived from the Latin Petrus, which is the same name that gave us Peter. Or they may be honoring the scientist who invented the Petri dish.
That tiny dot above lower case “I” and “j” letters has an actual name: tittle. It is thought that the phrase “to a T” is actually derived from the phrase “to a tittle”—a phrase that was used in the same sense dating back to the early 17th century.
Alexander Liang, wrote of the pronunciation of Dr. Seuss:
You’re wrong as the deuce And you shouldn’t rejoice If you’re calling him Seuss. He pronounces it Soice (or Zoice)
Geisel switched to the anglicized pronunciation because it “evoked a figure advantageous for an author of children’s books to be associated with—Mother Goose” and because most people used this pronunciation.
And yet a shrinking population due to a sharply reduced birth rate is a BAD thing for developed countries, at least when coupled with increasing longevity, because the average age increases, which is a social and economic burden.
What is optimal to restore balance is more of a Thanos style population reduction, I guess. He was right all along!
The feminine form “Petra” is much better known in US circles. It’s also a fairly common female name in German-speaking countries. The linked wiki has lots of examples in many European languages.
Sort of the opposite situation here:
Around the WW-I timeframe two brothers from Scotland, Allan and Malcolm Loughead set up a business in the USA. Which they cleverly named the Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company after themselves. The problem was nobody could pronounce it correctly.
It went bankrupt in the post WW-I recession. When one of the brothers decided to start a similar company a few years later Lockheed Aircraft was born.
Both names are pronounced the same. Moral of the story?
If’n you can’t teach ‘em, make it simple enough they don’t need no teachin’.
John Gray, who wrote “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus,” got a degree from Columbia Pacific University. Barbara DeAngelis, who also wrote (14) bestselling books about relationships, attended Columbia Pacific University as well.
They were married (to each other) then got divorced.
An August 1995 site visit committee of the Council for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education found that CPU had not met the new regulations. It failed the 1995 visit on the basis of 88 points. The council’s review of CPU listed numerous violations of academic standards, including:
“One master’s-degree student was given credit for “a learning contract describing how he would continue taking dance lessons and watch dance demonstrations in order to improve his skills as a Country Western dancer.””
“A Ph.D. dissertation written in Spanish was approved by four faculty who cannot speak the language.”
“One dissertation “had no hypothesis, no data collection, and no statistical analysis. A member of the visiting committee characterized the work as more like a project paper at the college freshman level.” The dissertation, The Complete Guide to Glass Collecting , was 61 pages long.”
“At least nine students who received the Ph.D. degree in 1994 had been enrolled less than 20 months, four of them less than 12.”[18]
Organic materials glowing under a blacklight is fairly common, enough so that blacklights are often used to look for stray organic material. While platypus fur isn’t the first organic material on most folks’ minds, it’s hardly surprising.
A friend of mine sent me the link to the wiki article for the Gävle Goat, a traditional Swedish yule goat (that itself an interesting random fact) made of local straw and grasses. It has been destroyed by vandals 36 of the last 53 years, despite escalating security measures. Skip to the timeline, it’s really quite comical:
Being the time of year it is, the 2020 Goat has just been “inaugurated” as the wiki charmingly puts it.
Here’s the town’s/goat’s official site. It contains a sorta-live feed webcam; really just a jpg they update every few seconds. I can’t post it so you can see it here, but it’s at that link partway down the page. At least as of this moment, early evening in Sweden on Dec 4, the goat is alive and well.
The words “pie” and “magpie” are cognates, both coming to English through French from Latin “pica”. The bird is the original sense, with “mag” (nickname of “Margaret”) prepended to denote “chatty, talkative, gossipy”. The pastry refers to the birds’ habit of gathering miscellaneous things into their nests (somewhat pie-shaped); this connotation continues into the word “potpie”.
With that background, you can now appreciate the humor in the nursery couplet “Four and twenty blackbirds, Baked in a pie.”
There is a British expression Not on your Nellie which means - absolutely not. It occurred to me today, for the first time in my sixty-odd years, that this expression - which I have been aware of almost since I could talk - is probably Cockney rhyming slang. And so it is
Not on your Nellie = Not on your Nellie Duff = Not on your puff = Not on your life
(“Puff” is being used in the sense of breath.)
As I said, I have known the phrase almost all my life, and it never occurred to me until today that it was rhyming slang. And the thing is, rhyming slang is so ingrained in British English that this sort of ignorance as to a phrase’s origins is not at all unusual. Two other examples where I came to a similar realisation after many, many years:
An instruction to have a think about something:
Use your loaf! = Use your loaf of bread = Use your head
And one which maybe rings a bell in the US - to be by yourself:
Rhyming slang isn’t common in US English, though, which makes the occasions where it does show up all the more surprising. For instance, in US slang, a “raspberry” is when you squeeze your lips together and blow through them (like what you do when playing a brass instrument, only without the mouthpiece). It comes from “raspberry tart”.
