WHILE many geneticists make do with unpronounceable strings of letters and digits to name their discoveries, by tradition fruit-fly folk get to call them what they like.
One of their better-known examples is Sonic Hedgehog, which came about when researchers ran out of real hedgehog names for a family of genes for spikiness and, no doubt with a total absence of hilarity, plumped for a video-game character.
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But there is another fruit-fly name that has apparently been lurking in the labs for quite some time without us knowing it. Step forward the I’m not dead yet gene and take a well deserved bow – the more so because, intriguingly and illogically, mutations that disable this gene make the fly live longer. There are many more such names at .
LOGOTECHNICIANS – those who come up with names for new things – must always beware the risk of heteroradicalism. This useful word, as a reader called Arkady English points out, means “from mixed roots” and describes that bane of pedants everywhere: words such as “television” whose parts come from more than one language (“tele” from the Greek for “far”; “vision” from the Latin for “see”).
Heteroradicalism is itself derived from the Greek heteros, “mixed or different”, and the Latin radix, “root”. Of course. And if Arkady English is someone’s real name, they would appear to be heteroradical themselves.
ONCE upon a time there was a baseball team called the California Angels. Then they became the Anaheim Angels. Now they’ve decided that this is over-restricting the market for their merchandise, and they want to associate themselves with the metropolis to the north-west by re-re-naming themselves The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
“The weight of the Ultralite II 900 midi sleeping bag, according to vango.co.uk, is 0g. Presumably it contains no chemicals”
And thus they enter Feedback’s very own Hall of Fame, the one for redundant translation syndrome (2 April). For not only is “The The Angels Angels of Anaheim” redundant, it looks recursive too. Now, can the La Brea Tar Pits neighbourhood of Los Angeles (21 May) muster a team?
REPORTING on the successful landing of the space shuttle earlier this month, BBC news online announced, perhaps a little breathlessly, that Discovery touched down “at about 322km/h (200mph) – roughly 20 times the speed at which a commercial plane approaches the ground”.
What Simon Painter wants to know is: how do those planes m aintain enough lift to stop them stalling and crashing into the runway? Malcolm J. Muckle, another of several readers to spot this, suggests that maybe the gravity’s a bit thin at Andrews Air Force base. But it’s so simple. It must be that Area 51 anti-gravity technology. It’s such a cosmic secret NASA itself has forgotten planes regularly put it to use.
HEADLINESE is a wonderful language, capable of concision and precision. However, Feedback is puzzling over this, from : “Acupuncture has scientific effect on brain: study”.
We’re drawn to the interpretation that suggests acupuncture inclines brains toward study of a scientific kind. But then, surely, those brains would conclude that chakras are cobblers and the acupuncture would stop working, leaving the brains less scientific, after which…
NOW that Feedback has sorted out Inverclyde Council’s morally spotless website and most of its references to the “mussels and *bleep*les” of the Clyde estuary (28 May), it’s time to move on. For example to , the site of a renewable energy company. Follow the link for their “Pacific 100” product and you will be informed that its “sealed pivot and slip ring assembly allows unlimited weather*bleep*ing.”
Martin Stuart, who spotted this, finds it “most amusing” but neglects to suggest what the original word might have been. Feedback feels grubby but smug for happening to know that “weathercocking” in nautical speech means turning to the wind.
WE found many rude words while looking for more examples of diontologias – statements that can be doubly true at the same time, such as “This is a cat scan” (20 August). There used to be a website called cat-scan.com, concerned with “computerised feline tomography”. It disappeared in mid-2003, but through the magic of you can see some very strange examples of scanned cats. Despite the facts that absolutely no tomography was involved, there were firm instructions to avoid feline faces and at least one online reviewer insisted she had to fight her cats for possession of her scanner, the site attracted some very vituperative responses from cat-lovers.
One friend of ours suggested that diontologias are simply double entendres, but others made the distinction clear by throwing up numerous examples that are unprintable in a family science magazine. In the silence that ensued, another uttered “Feedback has been sent to Coventry”.
We couldn’t help remembering this as we sat forlorn, unwilling and alone on a train about to depart to that very town.
