Lazarus

The Creationを読んでいると固有名詞が何の説明もなく、あたかも常識であるかのように出てきました。次の二か所だけ引用します。
A second Lazarus project brought back the Mauritian kestrel, a small tawny falcon limited to the world's icon of extinction.

A new and already world famous Lazarus candidate is the ivory-billed woodpecker, a dramatically large, conspicuous bird of the southern United States. "Lazarus" を辞書で見ます。
・Collins Dictionary: the brother of Mary and Martha, whom Jesus restored to life (John 11?12): The Gospel story of Lazarus returning from the dead did not relate what he had found there.
・Vocabulary.com: the person who Jesus raised from the dead after four days in the tomb; this miracle caused the enemies of Jesus to begin the plan to put him to death
なるほど、聖書に出てくる人ですね。日本の朱鷺の様に絶滅した（と思われた？）生物を再び繁殖させようとする運動なので "Lazarus" が出てくるのですね。

trophic

地下鉄神田駅の出口近くに老舗の鰻屋があり、窓には鰻丼\4,000のポスターが貼ってあります。一方、吉野家やなか卯などのファーストフード店では千円もしない鰻丼を盛んに宣伝しています。もちろん味も鰻の量も倍の差がありますが、４倍はちょっとどうかと思います。 乱獲や地球の環境変化により天然資源が激減するのは人類にとって大問題です。The Creationはその大問題の解決を一緒に努力しようと、影響力の強い宗教家に訴えてます。そのThe Creationから引用します。
Not even the high seas are safe from the human onslaught. Fish that exist at high  trophic levels and hence are large and commercially favoured, such as cod and tuna, declined precipitously through overhavesting between 1950 and 2000.
さて、"high trophic levels" とは何でしょう？ "trophic" を辞書で調べます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: Of or relating to feeding and nutrition: ‘The direct effects of plant quality on omnivores is, therefore, likely to induce a trophic cascade whereby plant feeding by the omnivore ultimately benefits the plant.’
・Wiktionary: 1.Of or pertaining to nutrition 2.(ecology) Describing the relationships between the feeding habits of organisms in a food chain
鰻丼は滋養が高いとされていますが、寿司も同様ですが、店で食べると野菜などの副食が余りに少なくバランスのとれた食事ではなさそうです。

copse

The Creationから取り上げる今日の単語は以前何かで見たことはありますが、意味を思い出せないので今度こそ覚えたい。
Researchers have found that when people of different cultures including those of North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, are given freedom to select the setting of their homes and work places, they prefer an environment that combines three features. They wish to live on a height looking down and out, to scan a parkland with scattered trees and copses spread before them, closer in appearance to a savanna than to either a grassland or a closed forest, and to be near a body of water, such as a lake, river, or sea.
"copses" ですが、木に対応する物なので草の事かとも思いますがどうでしょう？
・Oxford English Dictionary: A small group of trees: ‘I don't see the hedges, the trees, the copses; and the flights of wild fowl passing across my window go unseen, too.’
・Collins Dictionary: another word for coppice: a thicket or dense growth of small trees or bushes, esp one regularly trimmed back to stumps so that a continual supply of small poles and firewood is obtained: I have seen a single branch joined to two or three others in an overgrown coppice.
丁寧な説明のあるVocabulary.comにもこの単語は掲載されています。
A copse is a thicket of bushes or a small stand of trees. A copse of trees can provide a good hiding place during a game of hide-and-seek.
If you go to your local garden shop and ask about how to take care of your copse, you may get some blank stares, as it's not a word you'll find much in everyday use. The word first appeared in the late-sixteenth century, as a shortened form of coppice, a word still used in British English, referring to an area with trees or shrubs that are periodically cut back to the ground so that they grow back thicker.
"coppice" と共に "copses" を今度こそコピット覚えたい（朝ドラの影響は大きい）。

Not brightest bulb...

POLAND. A 25-year old man stole tools from a roadworks site, and while he was about it, nabbed the flashing warning sign, too. As he left the scene of the crime, he saw a police patrol car and quickly hid behind a bus stop, unaware that the flashing light was giving his whereabouts. （リーダーズダイジェスト、世界の間抜けな泥棒特集より）

Memories vs experiences

今月の７日に "ham-handed" を採り上げましたが、３年前に同義語の   "ham-fisted" を採り上げた時に一緒に覚えていなければいけない表現でした。何となく見た事のある表現だとは思いましたが、数年に一度程度見る表現は中々覚えられません。
ところで、今日は記憶と経験についての次の気に入った台詞を引用します。
"Memories makes you sentimental, experiences make you smart." Amit Kalantri, author

shank's mare

夏になったので植物の生育が速いので、昨日は出勤前の畑仕事に手間取りブログ投稿の時間が無くなりました。
さて、生物の多様性の保存が大切な事を説いたEdward O. Wilson著のThe Creationを読んでいます。次に引用する個所に出てくる動物 "wolverine" or "Gulo gulo" はWikipediaの写真で見ると熊の一種のように見える稀少動物です。
Its savage demeanor is not, however, why I want to avoid the wolverine. The reason is that I find Gulo gulo the embodiment of wildness, and I know there will still be untrammeled habitats on Earth if wolverines still roam there. I trust they will hold on in the vast subarctic forest, somewhere in North America or Eurasia, in places too far to be reached easily by vehicles or shank's mare.
私が気になったのは "shank's mare" で、"mare" に雌馬の意味があるので馬車の一種かと思いましたが、辞書で確認すると違いました。
・McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs: Fig. travel on foot. You'll find that shank's mare is the quickest way to get across town. Is there a bus, or do I have to use shank's mare?
・Wiktionary: one's own legs, especially as a means of moving from one place to another: The only way we can get there is by shanks' mare.
徒歩のことですか。でも今度は何故これが徒歩の意味になったのか気になります。 後者の辞書には次の様に由来を記述しています。
The expression -- believed to be Scottish in origin -- derives from shanks' nag (shanks-naig 1774), referring to the use of shank to refer to the part of the human leg between the knee and ankle. One theory cites "shank's mare" derived from a horse-drawn lawn mower, manufactured by Shanks & Company Ltd. (founded 1853) which required that the human operator walk behind the device to guide the horse; however, references to the phrase in Scottish literature pre-date the existence of the Shanks lawn mower.
Shanks社製の芝刈り機語源説はもっともらしかったのですが、残念ながらXですね。

scale insect

The Creationの著者は昆虫学者なので色々な昆虫が出てくるのは当然ですが、学名のような難しい名前は別として、英名を覚えておきたい昆虫も出てきました。
I realized upon seeing the ants and treehoppers at Concepcion de la Vega, lies in the scorched appearance of the dying crop plants. This is not an effect produced by any known ants, which very seldom consume plant material. But it does result from heavy infestations of sap-sucking homopterous insects, including aphids, scale insects--and tree hoppers. Fire ants are among the kinds of ants that protect these insects, and in exchange the homopterans provide them with liquid excrement rich in sugar and amino acids.
"homopterous insects" と "homopterans" は同じ昆虫類を指して、植物の液を吸う虫と説明がありますが、対応する日本語は知りません。しかし、"scale insects" の方は "scale" が付いているので鱗を備えた様な虫の様ですが何でしょう？　辞書を見ます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A small insect with a protective shieldlike scale. It spends most of its life attached by its mouth to a single plant, sometimes occurring in such large numbers that it becomes a serious pest.
・Collins English Dictionary: any small homopterous insect of the family Coccidae and related families, which typically live and feed on plants and secrete a protective scale around themselves. Many species, such as the San Jose scale, are important pests.: A scale insect may colonise the reverse sides of leaves.
やはりこの手の虫は写真を見た方が早いですね。Wikipediaに掲載の写真を見るとどうもカイガラムシの類を指すようです。

irrupt

一か月程前だと思いますが、NHKのドキュメンタリー番組で南米のツノゼミを知りました。そのツノゼミ（"treehopper"）が今読んでいるThe Creationに出てきました。
A lone sunlower grew on the barren surface of the open space. It was swarming with small dark brown ants. Huddled in the axils of its leaves were families of treehoppers, strange distant relatives of aphids with shark fin spines that protruded from their backs. When I pulled the leaves apart to collect specimens, the ants swarmed over my hands, biting and stinging them. Each sting burned like a match held too close, and most raised a small welt that itched for hours afterward. It was obvious that the ants were protecting the treehoppers.
...
Around 1518, a plague of ants irrupted at the fledging Spanish colony on Hispaniola.
和名はツノゼミですが、蝉とは全く似ていません。上の引用文にあるように "aphid"（アリマキ、アブラムシ） の遠い親戚と言われた方が納得できます。ところで覚えたい単語は "irrupted" です。 "irrupt" を辞書で調べます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: (Of a bird or other animal) migrate into an area in abnormally large numbers.: ‘But climate change, restoration, biotechnology, and irrupting species have forced ecologists to consider what was, in order to imagine what ought to be.’
・WordNet: increase rapidly and in an uncontrolled manner ("The island's rodent population irrupted")
"treehopper" 様々な形の種類があり、その中でも "brazilian treehopper" は特にユニークでその形も色々と異なる仲間がいます。

parsimonious

Edward O. WilsonのThe Creationを読んでいます。耳慣れない生物名が頻繁に出てきますが、小説とは異なり、話の進め方は理にかなっていて分かり易い。
Nature dies hard. Even in the parking lot extremum, notice the resilient little weed that peeps from a crack in the concrete, the tuft of grass holding on at the curb, the faint clorous span of the cyanobacterial colony plastered next to the ticket kiosk. Look closely for tiny creatures that thrive in their parsimonious midst: the mite, the nematode worm, the catapillar struggling to grow into a moth.
"parsimonious" とは何でしょう？
　 ・Oxford English Dictionary: Unwilling to spend money or use resources; stingy or frugal: 'parsimonious New Hampshire voters, who have a phobia about taxes’
・Cambridge English Dictionary: not willing to spend money or give something: She's too parsimonious to heat the house properly.: figurative I think that politicians are often rather parsimonious with the (= do not tell the complete) truth.
昨年 " parsimony" を取り上げたのを思い出しました。スペルの似ている "persimmon" は知っていますが、" parsimony" と "parsimonious" は中々覚えられません。柿の渋柿から渋ちん、そして "parsimony" を連想することにしよう。

Grave misgivings

私も中元や歳暮で何を贈ろうかよく迷いますが、誕生日のプレゼントに何を贈るか迷った人の話です。 Fresh out of gift ideas, a man buys his mother-in-law a large plot in an expensive cemetery. On her next birthday, he buys her nothing, and immediately she yells at him. "What are you complaining about?" he fires back. "You still haven't used the present I gave you last year."