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Easy experiments in phyto-
I only recently learned of the good luck properties of the four leaf May Apple (first chronicled here). Since then, I’ve been on quest to see one of these elusive bringers of good fortune for myself. My search was finally rewarded in spades on one of my countless dog-walks with Louis, through a damp, shady patch of lowland. I stumbled on a small patch of ground that sported quite a few of the lucky May Apples!
Why, after it being so hard to locate even one four leaf May Apple, did I find such a large number of them in a single spot? Surely that’s not just coincidence!
I can think of a couple of possible reasons why so many lucky May Apples would be clustered so close together. One possibility is that all of the four leaf May Apples there are related, descending from a particularly lucky bloodline (sap-line?). I call this my “Skywalker” hypothesis. The second possibility is that the patch of ground itself is somehow lucky enough to spawn a whole flock of these quadri-foiled lucky charms. This is my “Shangri-La” hypothesis. (On a side note, did you ever notice that “Shangri-La” is an anagram for “Sri Lanka”? Especially in Sanskrit.[1] Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?)
I tried to think of a way I could experimentally determine if either of my hypotheses were correct. I reasoned that if the luckiness of these May Apples was due to the location itself, then I might be able to find some other manifestation of luck there.
Not being a trained botanist, the only other lucky plant I knew of was a four leaf clover, so I scoured the area for that. Never having found a four leaf clover in this neighborhood, I reasoned that if I actually found one in my four leaf May Apple patch, it would lend strong credence to my “Shangri-La” hypothesis. But I couldn’t find any, which didn’t really support or contradict either of my hypotheses in my genetics-vs-environment mystery. So for now, I can’t say why all these four leaf May Apples are living so close together.
It might have been fun to harvest some of the lucky May Apples and measure how my good fortune improved, but I decided I would leave them as they were, and see what developed. I visited the same spot a few weeks later, and found something strange and fascinating had occurred: some of them seemed to be trying to morph into five leaf May Apples!
One looked like it had budded a small fifth leaf, starfish-style, that was starting to grow next to the other four. Another had apparently started the process of spontaneously splitting one of the leaves down the middle (“blattfurcation”), leading again ultimately to a five leaf May Apple.
What in the world was going on?! Were the May Apples trying to morph into less-lucky varieties, and if so, why?
I developed two theories to explain this.
(1) Karmodynamics tells us that luck can’t be created from nothing—the plant must expend effort to produce the luck that might some day benefit the creature that harvests it, be it fieldmouse, caterpillar, person or leprechaun. It’s less clear to me how (or even if) this luck benefits the plant itself, so maybe it is just expending effort in an activity that has no real purpose. So perhaps evolutionary pressures favor the four leaf May Apple that can transform itself into something that doesn’t produce luck, so it can devote its energy into producing May Apple seeds or pollen or whatever such plants normally do with their energy. I call this my “Poison Pill” theory.
(2) My second theory is related, but it posits that the May Apple isn’t really changing its luck, perhaps it cannot change its luck. But it is changing its appearance to fool predators or harvesters that specifically target four leaf May Apples. (These harvesters are not just superstitious people or other two-legged sentient beings. Even an insect might develop such a dietary preference, if larvae who happen to prefer to munch on a four leaf May Apple are incrementally luckier in the fight to survive to become an adult, thus producing more luck-hungry larvae.) I call this my “Sad Sack” theory.
I confess I don’t know enough biology to figure out a way to distinguish which of my theories is true, or if there is a completely different explanation for these self-mutilating four leaf May Apples. Advice from any professional botanist among this blog’s readership on the subject would be gratefully accepted, and if this scientific mystery is solved, full credit will be given in a future post.
Next time: the mixed blessing of finding a four-leaf poison ivy.
Sharpen your vocabularity
It’s a truism (maxim, bromide, commonplace) that you can never have enough words, right? This week’s word-building section involves words with international antecedents.
The English of England is not exactly a foreign language, but when I used to read P. D. James mysteries, I would keep a notepad handy to write down the many unfamiliar words, like “numinous” and “importuning”. (On a side note, I love P. D. James mysteries because they are so severely unsentimental. They aren’t gritty or noir, just extremely staid and British. In one story, part of the murder plot revolved around whether tea should be brewed loose, or in tea bags. But I digress.) I’m sure you’ve experienced someone offering a boast disguised as a complaint—perhaps you’ve even tried it yourself now and then! If you have daughters, perhaps you’ve heard them complain “Oh, I just couldn’t get anything done! All the boys kept wanting to talk to me! It was very annoying.” There is a word for this structure of speech: it’s called Importooting.
Kathleen and I both struggle with hoarding issues, but we’ve been getting better. Last week we finally dumped an old rusty folding metal University of Maryland stadium chair. It only had three legs (the fourth had rusted through), was un-sittable, and in fact had never been sat on, had anything placed on it, appeared in a scenic yard tableau, or been put to any use whatsoever in all the time I knew of its existence, which must be more than 40 years.
Still, it was a tough decision—it was an antique and a survivor (until now), perhaps the sole survivor of its entire clan of chairs. And it had a rickety charm to it, at once nostalgic and sad, kind of like Eeyore’s house in Winnie the Pooh. There is an adjective that describes this shabby broken-down appeal precisely: that chair is Wobbly-Sobbly. (The word derives from “Wabi-Sabi”, the Japanese term for craft or art that is intentionally crude, rustic, or incomplete.)
A Herptile (sometimes “herpetile”) is most simply defined as a creature who is the proper study of the science of herpetology: that is, an amphibian or non-avian reptile. (Wait, what? I thought all reptiles were non-avian reptiles! Are you telling me that birds are reptiles? I mean, I know they descended from dinosaurs, I’ve seen Jurassic Park, but I thought birds were in a class of their own. Some quick in-depth research (I googled “are birds reptiles?”) quickly settled the question in definitive internet fashion. The first four entries I read had the following three answers:
(1) Birds are in the class Aves (“birds”).
(2) Birds are in the class Reptilia (“reptiles”)—there is no class Aves.
(3) There is no class Reptilia, because if there were, it would have to include birds, and that’s just crazy talk. Glad that’s cleared up!)
How often have you found yourself approaching a couple pushing a baby carriage down the street? “Oh, what an adorable baby!” you gush. You don’t really know anything about the child, but it’s an easy social responsibility to fulfill—at least in English! But there are some languages where you can’t even say that sentence without guessing the sex of the baby, and woe betide you if you guess wrong! The Italian for baby is bambino—unless it’s a girl, then it’s bambina. What do you do if it’s so swaddled up that you can’t tell? Guess wrong and insult the whole family?
Fortunately, the Italians have borrowed from another Latin community to provide the solution: if you find yourself in this fix, just say “such a lovely Bambinx (pronounced ‘bambinex’)!” The parents will take your caution in addressing their scion in such a gender-neutral way as a sign of respect.
Let’s see, how about ending with something germanic? Thanks to friend-of-the-blog (and friend) Kelly Samek for teaching me the German word for the comfort food you eat to make you feel better when you’re sad. It’s Kummerspeck, which is usually translated as “grief bacon”. It’s a near-perfect word that is only marred, in my view, by the fact that bacon is not my go-to food of choice for cheering me up. I don’t need fat, I need carbs! Or better, fat and carbs! Like macaroni & cheese, for example. That’d be, uh, “Kummer-käsen-nudeln”? I’ll keep working on that.
Footnotes
1. There is actually no reference supporting this assertion, and I’d be grateful if you don’t fact-check it.