This has been the day for weird words, I swear.
"Springtails" came across my desk-- quite literally-- at about 1 a.m. this morning. That is, in the quiet of the office, I noticed a little, almost raindrop-like noise, as if someone had just tapped a stack of papers on the desk very lightly with a fingernail. And then I heard it again, and suddenly a tiny, skinny insect (3 mm long or so) was sitting in the middle of my desk. I moved my hand toward it and the insect moved about a foot and a half (if you're counting, that's about 150 times its body-length) in an eyeblink. After a couple of tries, I squooshed it, but there was another one hopping about just a minute later. And I realized, after I peered at one-- they *were* hopping, they didn't have wings. I was worried that they were fleas, but they didn't look like fleas. I got a good, close look, went hunting on the 'net, and found them. (I am, after all, a librarian. Something worries or scares me and what do I do? I look it up.)
It turns out they weren't after my blood (I'm human, not humus); the desk lamp and the damp from all the rain brought them out. And the more I read about them, the more I learned that they're kind of nifty critters. Besides having this amazing cataput built into their butts, they're one of the few insects that are active on snow banks, and some even glow in the dark. And a springtail is the oldest fossil insect in the world!
As for "quine", I ran across the word as part of a title, The Harper's Quine. (My techie readers shouldn't get all excited, it's not THAT kind of quine.) The book description gave no indication of what the weird word in the title might mean. It's a mystery novel set in 15th c. Scotland. Armed with that information, a bit of poking turned up "Quine - from the Doric dialect (used in the North East of Scotland), meaning 'young woman' or 'daughter'." Further poking indicated that it's a fairly generic term in that region for "girl," as in "guys and girls." (For the curious, the word for a guy in the same cant is "loon."
Alright, one more and I'm going to bed. The fall children's book preview issue of PW held an ad for an amusing-looking picture book entitled Pigaroons. I didn't even get a description on that one, just a few subject headings from Amazon.com-- pigs, festivals, and stealing. But one look at that jaunty balloon-ship on the cover and a little background knowledge of the word picaroon, and the canny reader might opine that we're in for a aerial tale of piratical, plunderous porkers. We Shall See.
Posted by gris at July 28, 2004 11:58 PM