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Every so often when reading an otherwise serious scholarly work, one comes across a little spark of the writer’s personality. Sometimes it seems to be a touch of exasperation at a difficulty in the subject under discussion. In Oliver Padel’s Cornish Place-Name Elements (English Place-Name Society, 1985) on page 96 he deals with the place-name element evor. His comment on this is:
some kind of plant
Maybe I’m getting too fanciful, but it conjures up a picture of the author, after a lot of head scratching, muttering an imprecation and scribbling the definition down.
When I was an undergraduate, I shared a flat with some former school-friends, one of whom was studying medicine. He once showed me a little passage in his pharmacology text book. Now I reckon the subject is not one usually thought of as a barrel of laughs, but the author of this book couldn’t help slipping in the odd wry comment. The one I can remember concerned a drug, a sedative I think, that the author quite gratuitously pointed out could be used to dope race-horses, but that has a surprising effect on cats. Instead of slowing them down, it makes them hyperactive. The writer finished off the paragraph with the observation:
Of course, one does not usually race cats.
Photo: Echinopsis mamillosa. Credit: Stan Shebs. Used under this licence.
Speaking of cats, sort of, my MD brother was explaining his research using a drug which rendered cats cataleptic. His friend, burdened by four noisy children, asked “What’s the pediatric dosage?”
This post has made me laugh. Thank you, John and Judy.
Every subject has its emergency exits for when explanations dry up. Was there any evidence quoted for the plant? Another I’ve always been sceptical about in lingistics is sound change “by analogy”. That’s a way of recording that something similar happened here and here, but no-one wants to say “we don’t know why”.
During the 1980s I had the pleasure of contributing to the (London) Times correspondence columns a couple of examples of very serious lexicographers being somehow unable to resist inserting into their definitions not completely suitable asides. They were the sad little parenthesis after currant bun in the great Henry Cecil Wyld’s Universal Dictionary, “(with few or no currants)” and the definition of ‘it stands to reason’ by the Fowler brothers, who boiled down the OED in 1911 to make the Concise Oxford Dictionary: “It is logically demonstrable (that)” or popularly, “I shall lose my temper if you deny (that)”. I regret to report that in 1976, this felicitous item was eliminated from the COD.
Regarding Judy’s brother’s research on drugs that made cats CAT-aleptic…I can imagine references to that producing from some people on occasion rather unserious prosodic treatments such as I have alluded to in my crudely unorthodox spelling.
@Sidney
Padel records that cognate words occur in:
Welsh: efwr = “cow-parsley, hogweed”
Breton: evor = “bourdaine, ellebore”
Old Irish: ibar = “yew-tree”
So you can see his problem