Glad mine's not
I happened to be having a bit of a read of a fairly recent New Scientist the other day. For those who are not aficionados, it has a section on the back page called The Last Word, where people send in questions about the whys and hows of everyday puzzles. This particular edition had a picture of a strange pattern that someone had found on their windowsill.
The patterns have been produced by snails grazing on algae. The snail scrapes off the algae with its radula - a sort of tongue with teeth. Hence the Cornish proverb Tavas medall ew howlsethas an bullhorn, which in English becomes "A smooth tongue is a snail's undoing".
- David Ridge
Possibly my favourite proverb EVER. Perfectly bizarre, but not at all nonsensical. Nicely lyrical, but biologically accurate.
I thought it was too good to be true and this bloke might be taking the piss and seeing if he could invent a proverb and pass it off as real. Howlsethas? Bullhorn? But I did some googling for Cornish dictionaries online and it turns out that "tavas" IS actually cornish for tongue (I couldn't find any of the other words). Hurray - I'd like it anyway, but being real makes it even more awesome!
Now all I have to do is figure out how to use it in casual conversation... I would quite like to use it to enigmatically put down some silver-tongued charmer - refusing to explain, of course. But actually I think maybe it means that sometimes what seems to be a negative trait is actually a good thing. Any ideas?
posted by Eloise @ 3:58 pm
5 comments
5 Comments:
I read this, and was smug to see that I was right in my guess of what caused the scraped patterns in the first place, and hoped very much that "bullhorn" meant "snail", because it's brilliant.
I hardly noticed the proverb at all, but now I have I see that it is a good one, and I don't know what it could mean other than something that might be negative actually being good. I need more time to think of examples though; I've been reading about the sea a lot (worryingly, I don't want to be a marine conservationist, really, argh!), and my mind is full of Holothurians and winged deep sea snails. Both are endearingly bizarre and so far from land-dwelling experience that I don't think they fit any kind of proverb.
I want to hear the proverb said in a Cornish accent! In my mind it sounds too Welsh.
it's funny how differently we read it... it didn't really occur to me to guess what the patterns were.
I like the idea of winged snails. Do they still exist?
They are beautifully, very real, floating somewhere out there in the ocean currents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pteropod
They used to be called Pteropods (winged foot - very logical), but that seems to be out of date. They're 9 families of gastropods in a sub-order of their own, and their common name is "sea butterfly" which makes them sound much prettier than I think they are, because they're surrounded by a big mucus cloud that they trap plankton in to feed.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/deep-sea/dn10756-marine-census-reveals-jurassic-shrimp-and-more.html
As they have aragonite shells they are more buggered even than most things with acidifying waters, because aragonite is extremely dissolvable.
Oooh pretty! I like their loud of mucus, but to me sea butterflies is a bit boring... winged snails sounds much more strange and interesting. Poor dissolving things.
*cloud. Though I am quite amused to specualte what a loud of mucus might be.
Post a Comment
<< Home