www.alphadictionary.com

• anemophilous •

Pronunciation: æ-nê-mah-fê-lês • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Adjective

Meaning: Wind-loving, wind-blown, currently used exclusively by botanists in referring to those plants that depend on the wind to distribute their pollen (opposed to those that depend on insects attracted to their nectar).

Notes: I keep finding little lexical gems like today's Good Word that should be in the poetic if not general vocabulary, but are instead secreted away in one of the sciences. Anemophilous applies to anything that loves or thrives in wind, not just plants that use the wind for propagation. The noun is anemophily "love of wind", which makes a wind-lover an anemophile [ê-nee-mê-fail].

In Play: Anything you can imagine enjoying or thriving on wind is anemophilous: "Anemophilous gulls sailed aimlessly above on billowing drafts of warm summer air, as the water-bound sailors below stared up at them in awe and admiration." It is a word that works well with imagination: "Gunilla claims to have bought a convertible to slake the thirst of her anemophilous hair for rushing air."

Word History: Today's beautiful Good Word is a compound based on Greek anemos "wind" and philos "love" plus an adjective suffix, -ous. Anemos also underlies anemone, the 'wind flower' that the Greeks thought bloomed only when the wind blows. The sea anemone was so named for its resemblance to the flowering plant. Anemos comes from a root that originally referred to breathing, for we find it again in Latin anima "soul, spirit", which underlies English animal. The connection between breathing and the soul probably came from sight of breath exiting the body on a cold day. To the ancient mind, animals are beings that possess souls.

In both Hebrew (ruah) and Greek (pneuma) that same word can be translated as wind, breath, or spirit. "God breathed into man, and he became a living soul (nephesh hayah)," the same idea as above. And John 3 depicts Jesus playing on the word. "The wind blows where it will...so is everyone born of the Spirit." Wind and spirit here both translate "pneuma."

Politicians: anemophilous members of the family Hominidae

To apply to poloticians I would like to make it hot air. May we coin thermalanemophilous? That doesn't quite get it. Can anybody create a better one?

Cool - a 'fancy' word I actually knew! I currently work as a developer in agriculture, and wheat and corn are sometimes described as anemophilous crops (as opposed to say zoophilous)

Some plants are called anemophilous. It has to do with pollen distribution. Corn must drop the pollen from its tassel onto the female element that actually produces the corn. The wind aids in pollination. I don't know about wheat since wheat didn't grow where I was a farmboy.

As for zoophilous don't go there. It doesn't mean what you might think. I do not know the word you are really looking for. Can someone provide a word describing a flowering plant that is pollinated by an insect? Bees pollinate flowers when they are gathering nectar and pollen.

Here is a question better than, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" There is a desert plant that can be pollinated only by one specific insect. Which came first, that insect or that desert plant? What are the odds of their developing simultaneously?

To apply to poloticians I would like to make it hot air. May we coin thermalanemophilous? That doesn't quite get it. Can anybody create a better one?

It needs more than "hot", it needs a prefix indicating
something akin to hurricane proportions.
And perhaps a suffix meaning "LIE".

Plants pollinated by insects:

en·to·moph·i·lous  (nt-mf-ls)
adj.
Pollinated by insects.
ento·mophi·ly n.

Plants pollinated by animals:

zo·oph·i·lous  (z-f-ls)
adj. Botany
Pollinated by animals.


Zoophilia, from the Greek ζῷον (zṓion, "animal") and φιλία (philia, "friendship" or "love") is the practice of sexual activity between humans and non-human animals (bestiality), or a preference for or fixation on such practice. People who practice zoophilia are known as zoophiles,[1] zoosexuals, or simply "zoos".[2] Zoophilia may also be known as zoosexuality

MTC: Thanks for entomophilous. I still recommend one avoid the word zoophilous. However, if you feel comfortable using the word, it also describes animals who eat other animals but do not eat people. That might even describe non-vegetarian but non-canabalistic humans, I suppose. Remember, if you die in a room full of cats, they will eat you.

LUKE! Are you back? Hale and hearty?

To Philip: You're welcome. And by the way, fear of speaking certain words and names (like zoophilous) is onomatophobia.
See http://common-phobias.com/Onomato/phobia.htm

Think I'll ring up a psychiatrist after reading your word picture of ghoulish cats. I've developed ailurophobia, a morbid dread of cats.

P.S. Luke may feel it is wiser not to return with posts like these!

LUKE! Are you back? Hale and hearty?

I finally arrived. Made the announcement on a quiet note,
unlike the political nominees, in a thread called "Return".
I had people from everywhere looking at my machine
and doing everything they could.
Then one day last week I left to run errands and turned
off my computer, coming back around 3 PM I had
some 30 email notifications of threads I was following and
at least 3 weeks of the Docs daily word of the day.
So I don't know what happened, could not explain it
if I did know. But I am back, little worse for the wear.
I'm not too sure about "hale and hearty", but back
nonetheless. Thanks for the welcome and concern.

PS
I am not a cat person either. Love panthers, cheetahs and their
ilk, but the critters people have on their couches and sitting
on picture widows of houses as I do my daily walk; YUK.

I think the number of times zoophilous comes up, it is fairly unlikely to be confused with any other meaning in those contexts, so I think I'll stick with it!

I was however moved to look up Wikipedia zoophilia entry to check whether there was any link (thanks for the zoosexual term MTC - new to me!) and was interested in this Kinsey oriented paragraph:
"The Kinsey reports rated the percentage of people who had sexual interaction with animals at some point in their lives as 8% for men and 3.6% for women, and claimed it was 40–50% in people living near farms,[13] but some later writers dispute the figures, because the study lacked a random sample in that it included a disproportional amount of prisoners, causing sampling bias. Martin Duberman has written that it is difficult to get a random sample in sexual research, and that even when Paul Gebhard, Kinsey's research successor, removed prison samples from the figures, he found the figures were not significantly changed.[14]"

Any of our resident farmboys want to comment?

The farm boys might feel a bit sheepish about responding.

Along the same lines, Bob Hope joked, "Way out West, where the men are men and the sheep are nervous."

Obtaining accurate statistics on the prevalence of bestiality seems pretty much impossible for obvious reasons. Who would complete the questionnaire?