Awesome!

Kelly First gave me the most awesome book ever.



William T. Stearn's Botanical Latin.

Oh, you have no idea how helpful this book is. My botany class has just finished with the fungi and algae (neither of which are plants) and now we are beginning the climb into the bryophytes and the seedless vascular plants, each of which has it's own stable of terms invented by scientists who fancy themselves Latinists.

(They are delusional, of course, because science Latin (Latin-ese, I like to call it) is years away from classical Latin. I still burn over getting criticized by a third-class scientist when I pronounced a scientific name using classical Latin pronunciation. "You need to learn to say the names correctly," she sneered at me. And I thought, bitch, you need to learn some Latin.)

Anyway, learning the Latin-ese scientific names must be done and it's so much easier to learn the Latin-ese if you know the Latin-to-English translation of the word you're trying to learn.

Here's an example:


Mosses have these things called sporangiophores. The sporo- part refers to the spore and the -gio- part is related to genus or generate, of course, but what does the -phores part mean? Phores comes from the Latin -phores (which comes from the Greek -phoros) and it means bearing. Sporangiophores are the parts of sporophytes that bear the sporogenous tissue. 

See how clear it all becomes once you can decipher the Latin?

I'm joking.

It's confusing partly because we haven't retained the -phore ending in English for the most part. We're more used to seeing it written as -fer, as in conifer (cone bearing) or Jennifer (Jenny bearing).

(That last example was a joke.)

Anyway, so this book is awesome.