starfirebird

[starfirebird]

I, THE DRIVER BEHIND YOU AT THIS STOPLIGHT, HAVE DEDUCED THAT YOU COULD HAVE THREADED THAT LEFT TURN BETWEEN THOSE TWO CARS IF YOU FLOORED IT BEARING 92° SOUTH AND CAUGHT THE WIND.

HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK

#texans

[starfirebird]

enough about taylor swift already. reblog and tag the smallest, least known artist you listen to

#President Romana #she makes Doctor Who fanmusic and has a youtube channel with a few thousand subscribers #i’ve been downloading her songs as she releases them since 2013 #and i listened to them a ton in high school so i have a lot of then memorized

[starfirebird]

Table with the partinioning of the TREE-WOOD-FOREST semantic domain.

Georgakopoulos, Thanasis & Stéphane Polis. 2018. The semantic map model: State of the art and future avenues for linguistic research. Language and Linguistics Compass 12(2). e12270. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12270.

[starfirebird]

#AP classes and 11 different clubs and activities AND 5h a day of tumblr

[starfirebird]

"if you see someone shoplifting, no you didn't" no but like. i really didn't. i have never in my life seen someone shoplifting because i'm not watching anyone else in the grocery store..? how are y'all noticing things like that. my only goals are enter the store, survive, exit the store

[starfirebird]

I hate the “open floor plan” that everyone is obsessed with in houses now. I want nooks and crannies and bizarre floor plans. I don’t need to be able to see what someone is doing on the other side of the house. I want places to hide and lurk and dwell in the shadows. I am the beast who awaits in the labyrinth

[starfirebird]

[starfirebird]

#i applied to one company that has this but didn’t hear back #would love to see it everywhere #with all the stuff that’s automated people shouldn’t have to work so much

[starfirebird]

Fighting for my life trying to find a phone or tablet with a headphone jack. Fighting for my life trying to find a laptop with a cd rom. Fighting for my life trying to get more than one usb port or, god forbid, an hdmi. Fighting for my life trying to find any electronics that haven't been streamlined into flimsy chastity belts with the structural integrity of a sopping sheet of paper which require me to buy 3 extra devices (each with their own separate charging requirements) all because some silicon valley jackass somewhere decided holes were a bad thing.

[starfirebird]

I think I stumbled upon some kind of ichthyological forbidden knowledge. Opened up a book of names that were never meant to be read.

You've probably heard of "can-opener smoothdream", right? It's practically a meme by now.

But the thing is, it's a deep-sea fish. And deep-sea fish have historically not had English names because nobody drops them into the conversation over a hot cuppa. Sure, there's generic stuff like hatchetfish and barreleye, but when you want to refer to the actual fish you're probably saying such euphonious phrases as Diretmus argenteus, Sternoptyx diaphana, or maybe even Opisthoproctus soleatus.

So whence "can-opener smoothdream"? Certainly no non-ichthyologist has ever used that name. It's not even a direct translation of the scientific name Chaenophryne longiceps - that would be "long-headed gape-toad". Which to me is even cooler than "can-opener smoothdream".

But I digress. The "dream" bit comes from the anglerfish family Oneirodidae, from oneiros, "dream", because those marvelous fishes look like they came out of a dream (Pietsch, 2009).

Note that Pietsch (2009), more or less the anglerfish bible, uses English names at the genus level only. So Chaenophryne is the smoothhead dreamers genus but no mention is made of "can-opener smoothdreams". So no luck there.

Wikipedia, root cause of a lot of misinformation, has this to say.

"Longhead dreamer" is a far more accurate name. And in fact, despite Wikipedia prioritizing "can-opener smoothdream" (because it's funny?), the links listed use "longhead dreamer" and "smoothhead dreamer" as the name and "can-opener smoothdream" as an alternative.

So. Again. Where did "can-opener smoothdream" come from?

The answer, as it turns out, lies with McAllister (1990).

In the book A List of the Fishes of Canada, ichthyologist D. E. McAllister sought out to list every single fish known to Canadian waters, providing both an English and a French name.

And when there wasn't an English name, like for most deep-sea fishes, he arbitrarily gave them a name. And his names "differ in many instances from the widely accepted names" (Holm, 1998)

This had varying results. This is his name for one of the netdevil anglerfishes.

The humpback anglerfish or blackdevil anglerfish becomes a werewolf (????).

This one is just confusing.

The white-spotted lanternfish or Rafinesque's lanternfish instead becomes...

And most embarrassingly, the Mediterranean spiderfish gets saddled with something that "violates the tenet of good taste" (Holm, 1998).

This then is the original source of "can-opener smoothdream". It was invented by an ichthyologist in 1990, and has seen little to no use outside of how bizarre the name is.

Maybe McAllister's goofier names will catch on. Who knows? They certainly aren't very popular in the scientific community though.

References

Holm, E. (1998) Encyclopedia of Canadian Fishes (review). The Canadian Field-Naturalist, 112, p. 174-175.

McAllister, D. E. (1990) A List of the Fishes of Canada. National Museum of Natural Sciences, Ottawa.

Pietsch, T. W. (2009) Oceanic Anglerfishes: Extraordinary Diversity in the Deep Sea. University of California Press, Berkeley.

[starfirebird]

[starfirebird]

not a great photo but this is the first time I’ve ever caught Alessandra mid egg-eating!

#my pets #egg eating snake #dasypeltis #reptiles #reptiblr #alessandra

[starfirebird]

Its homestuck day Its homestuck day Its homestuck day Its homestuck day Its-

[starfirebird]

A perfectly reasonable sleeping position

#my pets #gargoyle gecko #everard #reptiles #reptiblr

[starfirebird]

[starfirebird]

#phantom of the opera energy

[starfirebird]