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?
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.
ReplyDeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of winged snails. Do they still exist?
They are beautifully, very real, floating somewhere out there in the ocean currents.
ReplyDeletehttp://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.
ReplyDelete*cloud. Though I am quite amused to specualte what a loud of mucus might be.
ReplyDelete