STRANGE BUT TRUE

Q: Calling all you word aficionados! Can you say what the following have in common: “addubitation” (questioning oneself), “circumplicate” (to wrap around), exsufflation (blowing out) and “impotionate” (poisoned)?

A: They’re all inkhorn terms (after portable ink containers that scholars hung from their belts), born out of a time in the 15th and 16th centuries when the English language experienced a vocabulary innovation, says Arika Okrent in Mental Floss magazine. These terms and many others eventually fell into disuse, as they were often “deliberately difficult, crafted to reflect well on the author rather than make things clear for the reader.” But a good number more entered the language with real staying power, including “absurd,” “adult,” “ambiguous,” “articulate,” “catastrophe,” “confide,” “deduce,” dilemma,” “education,” “enigma,” “exact,” “expert,” “explain,” “frequent,” “gradual,” “hero,” “illustrate,” “imitate,” “irony,” “lament,” “map, “myriad.”

From its origin as a “barbarian tongue,” unfit for philosophy, art, and spiritual matters (Latin and French were used), English came into its own once the printing press made it possible to spread ideas using everyday language, and the need for more English words became apparent. “In the end, English remained English,” Okrent says, discarding some words with Old English roots and absorbing other new words. “This ability to try on words and accept or reject them, whether they are Latin or not, is a sign of a language being robustly alive (unlike, say, Latin).”

Q: Do you know why horseshoe crab blood is blue?

A: Unlike humans whose blood has hemoglobin to carry oxygen through their bodies, horseshoe crabs depend on hemocyanin, explains Dan Lewis on his “Now I Know” website. Hemocyanin uses copper to deliver this oxygen, and while deoxygenated copper molecules are colorless, oxygenated ones are blue. And no, deoxygenated human blood is not blue until it hits the air.

Q: Let’s think globally on this one: Currently, are farmlands worldwide expanding or shrinking?

A: For the first time on record, they’re actually shrinking, as “every two years, an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom is abandoned,” says Joseph Poore in New Scientist magazine. Yet for most of the 20th century, the opposite was true, so that by the 1990s, farms occupied 38 percent of land worldwide, with 27 percent of tropical forests and 45 percent of temperate forests having been cleared.

So, what accounts for this dramatic reversal? For Poore, the answer lies in the choices we make every day as consumers, such as preferring cotton or synthetic to wool. During the 1990s, demand for polyester increased fourfold while that for wool fell 40 percent.

“Wool prices collapsed. Sheep farmers around the world, particularly those who were on degraded pasture or couldn’t diversify, abandoned their farms.”

The numbers tell the story: “One hectare of land can produce 300 kilograms of wool or 2000 kg of cotton, while synthetic fabrics require essentially no land.” Thus, in Australia and New Zealand, two major wool-producing countries, over 60 million hectares of pasture have been abandoned since 1990.” This trend continues in other areas, from the hilly regions of China to parts of Iran and Kazakhstan to Portugal, Chile and Argentina.

Concludes Poore: “The beginning of this century could mark the point when we began sharing more, not less of our planet with the other species that inhabit it.”