RANIVOROUS
Posted: Fri May 27, 2005 11:45 pm
• ranivorous •
Pronunciation: ræ-ni-vê-rês • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: Frog-eating.
Notes: You probably thought this word applied only to a small circle of animals. Guess what? Americans and Europeans are as ranivorous as any animal—a ranivorousness we may owe to the French, who long ago discovered the delicacy of flavor in the legs of the bull frog. The adverb would be ranivorously and the noun ranivorousness rather than ranivorosity. Creatures, like us, that eat frogs are ranivores. Anything shaped like a frog is said to be raniform.
In Play: Biologists are worried about the world-wide disappearance of frogs that cannot be attributed to ranivorous species. Many believe that frogs are a sentinel species, an early warning of a failure in our ecosystem that will mean more mosquitoes and other insects, and fewer ranivorous animals like minks, otters, raccoons, and snakes. Why are the frogs disappearing? We are sticking to our original theory: Bigfoot (Sasquatch, Yeti, the Abominable Snowman) is ranivorous and is breeding.
Word History: Today's relatively Good Word comes from a compound based on Latin rana "frog" + vorare "swallow whole, devour" + ous, an adjective suffix. Rana is a descendant of the PIE root *rek- "bellow", which is also behind Latin rancare "to bellow" and Russian rech' "speech". Latin vorare apparently devolved from a PIE root like *gwor- with an initial [g] that got lost in Latin and Greek, where we find bi-brôskô "to devour". In Sanskrit, however, we find the [r] in girati "s/he gobbles" but with an initial [g], which could have produced, by natural rules, the [zh] in Russian zhreti "devour, gobble".
Pronunciation: ræ-ni-vê-rês • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: Frog-eating.
Notes: You probably thought this word applied only to a small circle of animals. Guess what? Americans and Europeans are as ranivorous as any animal—a ranivorousness we may owe to the French, who long ago discovered the delicacy of flavor in the legs of the bull frog. The adverb would be ranivorously and the noun ranivorousness rather than ranivorosity. Creatures, like us, that eat frogs are ranivores. Anything shaped like a frog is said to be raniform.
In Play: Biologists are worried about the world-wide disappearance of frogs that cannot be attributed to ranivorous species. Many believe that frogs are a sentinel species, an early warning of a failure in our ecosystem that will mean more mosquitoes and other insects, and fewer ranivorous animals like minks, otters, raccoons, and snakes. Why are the frogs disappearing? We are sticking to our original theory: Bigfoot (Sasquatch, Yeti, the Abominable Snowman) is ranivorous and is breeding.
Word History: Today's relatively Good Word comes from a compound based on Latin rana "frog" + vorare "swallow whole, devour" + ous, an adjective suffix. Rana is a descendant of the PIE root *rek- "bellow", which is also behind Latin rancare "to bellow" and Russian rech' "speech". Latin vorare apparently devolved from a PIE root like *gwor- with an initial [g] that got lost in Latin and Greek, where we find bi-brôskô "to devour". In Sanskrit, however, we find the [r] in girati "s/he gobbles" but with an initial [g], which could have produced, by natural rules, the [zh] in Russian zhreti "devour, gobble".
