Better Than A Slater Up The Nose

Better Than A Slater Up The Nose

Originally shared by Meg L

Walking home in the beautiful Lancashire dusk, an 11 year old girl (now 96) invented the word “lighty-dark” to describe the light occurring at the edge of darkness after a cold clear day.

What's a 'chuggypig'? It’s just one of the regional terms for woodlouse; others being ‘sow-dug’, ‘slater’ and ‘johnny-grump’. The nature writer Robert Macfarlane reveals the language of the landscape that has been shared with him.

In our family, a woodlouse is an allywomp.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/14/robert-macfarlane-readers-letters-words

Comments

  1. Drew McCarthyAugust 10, 2016 at 8:05 AM

    Most excellent!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Meg LAugust 10, 2016 at 9:05 AM

    Macfarlane is an superb storyteller himself. Thanks for the intro to Rogue Male, Robert Rambusch

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Entremet

Entremet Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh "“Like most people in the US, I grew up knowing the words to this carol and even (shudder) singing them occasionally (singing is not a strong point of mine), but never really thought about what they meant, how the carol originated, or what birds were involved”, says Dr Rasmussen in email. So she decided to figure it out. Dr Rasmussen, who’s tied for third for the most bird discoveries in the world, is probably also the world’s foremost avian sleuth, due to her meticulous detective work a few years ago that uncovered the many ornithological thefts and records frauds in museums that were committed by eminent British ornithologist, Richard Meinertzhagen. But who would ever have thought that an old Christmas carol might also hold an avian mystery? “After all, it’s just a Christmas carol!” Dr Rasmussen points out." https://medium.com/@GrrlScientist/meet-the-real-birds-of-the-twelve-days-of-christmas-fame-grrlscientist-5a8bc09350c9
Read more

Flushbunkingly Gloriumptious

Flushbunkingly Gloriumptious Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh "Renowned children's author and occasional spy, Roald Dahl spent the last years of his life in a home located in the small English village of Great Missenden, and now his beloved village is home to an attractive museum devoted to his life and works.  [...] Today the museum holds all of Dahl's original manuscripts, as well as his "Idea Books" where he would jot down his nascent creations. In addition to celebrating his writing career, there are also displays covering his service in the RAF. However, the crown jewel of the museum is the recreation of Dahl's purpose built "Writing Hut," complete with the arm chair he had customized to write in." http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-roald-dahl-museum
Read more

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh So Labradors tend to overeat. Now it has been traced to genetic differences. "Dr Eleanor Raffan, a veterinary surgeon and geneticist who studies how genes influence metabolism at the Institute of Metabolic Science at the University of Cambridge recently published a study that examines the genetics that underlie food motivation and obesity in Labrador retrievers. [...] When Dr Raffan and her team carefully examined this POMC gene variant, they found that a small 14-basepair section a little more than halfway down the gene’s length was missing. This deletion creates a frameshift mutation that results in the production of an abnormal protein where the last half is scrambled into a blob of nonsense [...]. Normally, the POMC is translated into the POMC pro-peptide, which is cleaved at precise sites to give rise to number of smaller peptides, including the appetite suppressing neuropeptides, ß-MSH & ß-endorphin, but the abnormal POMC pro-peptide do...
Read more