I'm forever running into little oddments of information during writing research, usually on the way to something else. The opportunity to share them in conversation just never comes up, so I've decided to make Wednesday on this blog Random Research Day (you may not want to set your clock by that).
Words that mean "green"*:
viridescent
virescent
glaucous
Through the Middle Ages, men wrote books about childbirth (or inscribed them on papyri), but it was considered improper for them to watch babies be born. "In 1522, Dr. Wert, a German doctor, was sentenced to death when he was caught dressing like a woman and sneaking into a delivery room."**
* Dictionary v. 2.1.3, Apple Inc.
** Randi Hutter Epstein, Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth (2010), p. 5.
A lively and interesting, if not always fastidiously documented, account of birth through the ages. Makes one very glad to be bearing children in the 20th-21st century!
Glaucous is considered by most horticulturalists and botanists that I know to be blue. I think this is because it covers something that is usually very green and moves it to the bluer part of the spectrum.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Rook. That's the danger of random thesaurus lists of words: lack of proper context.
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