When philosophy meets historical taxonomy 5 Apr 2010 Chris Taylor does this absolutely amazing blog. I find myself checking to see if he’s done another one of his wonderful taxon posts, where he picks some usually obscure group of animals and makes them interesting and alive. He’s done it again, for indrids, a group of lemurs, but what I love most of all is that he cites a philosopher of science, Ian Hacking. That’s some serious blogging. Biology Ecology and Biodiversity Philosophy Science Species and systematics Systematics
Ecology and Biodiversity Hope for bonobos 21 Nov 2007 The African apes don’t get much good news these days. But the Congo has just announced they are setting up a preserve to protect the bonobo. The size of the Sankuru Nature Reserve is 11,803 square miles (in real money, 30 569.629 square kilometers), which makes it nearly half the… Read More
Evolution Myths about Darwin 10 Feb 200918 Sep 2017 We are going to hear a lot about Darwin this year, especially this month for his birthday (happy 200th, Chas. You don’t look a day over 150) and in November for the sesquicentenary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. And you will hear or read repetitions of… Read More
Academe Is reality liberal biased? Are liberals reality biased? 15 Jun 201118 Sep 2017 Josh Rosenau has a piece up on Chris Mooney’s latest article on the Republican war on science in the US. Conservative bodies around the western world seem to resist science when it conflicts with policy (usually driven by PR from large corporations), so the point is more than simply American… Read More
Chris’s blog is one of my favorites, too: I typically check it right afte seeing if there is anything new on Darren Naish’s “Tetrapod Zoology.” — The (sadly debunked) story about the name “Indri” coming from a misunderstanding of a native informant’s utterance seems to be a linguistic urban myth: a story that just seems so RIGHT that it stays alive (and reproduces: note the existence of variants with different examples) despite debunking. Do you know of any genuine examples of words stemming from such misunderstandings?(*) — (*) Samuel Johnson in his dictionary included the etymology “from French coeur méchant” for ‘curmudgeon’, attributing it to an “anonymous correspondent.” I have been told be people I trust (but can’t document) that a plagiarizing dictionary publisher said ‘courmudgeon’ was “from the French ‘coeur,’ anonymous, and méchant,’ a correspondent.” The French word for a transom over a door is ‘vasistas,’ which (according to Robert) is from the German ‘Wass ist das,’ but I don’t know if this stems from genuine confusion or some attempt at humor.
All flattery is gratefully received! Allen, the Hacking paper I cited comments on the example of the French ‘vasistas’. Hacking suggests that the word does come from German and simply refers to the function of the vasistas as somewhere you can look out from to see who (or what) is there before opening the door.
The derivation of ‘vasistas’ seems quite plausible to me, given that there is a respectable type of furniture known in English as a Whatnot. (You were probably sold it as a cake stand.)