There was much discussion in the pub last week about the weather, as usual, particularly the flooding in Co. Wexford. Some suggested that pearl mussels and slugs were to blame, a view also expressed in the newspapers by an Enniscorthy town councillor, though he talked about “pearls and snails”. So […]
Carl Linnaeus, the great 18th century Swedish biologist, gave scientific names, based on his binomial system, to over 4,000 species of animals (and even more plants). He called the donkey Equus asinus, which is literally just ‘horse donkey’ in Latin. But in English, ‘asinine’, meaning donkey-like, has become a synonym […]
