jinian | Locust, Jeffrey A. Lockwood

Fascinating book about acridology, entomologists, ecology, and glacier expeditions, marred slightly by a moody, current-events-ridden ending. Too many cool things to put in the roundup review.

Etymological footnote
After gleeful descriptions of locust-killing machinery of the mid-1800s, this footnote is appended to a reference to the "Robbins Hopperdozer ... essentially a modified road scraper with the interior coated in coal-tar."

Interestingly, the implement was not named after the bulldozer, which did not exist until the 1930s. Prior to the hulking machine, bulldozer referred to a person who intimidated by violence. This term had its origin in "bull dose," a slang phrase used on slave plantations for a severe beating that was literally "a dose fit for a bull." In the same year that hopperdozers were being invented, the term bulldozing came into popular use to describe the beating of black voters during the presidential election. Hopperdozers, on the other hand, were named for the effects of the coal tar or tar oil that was applied to the pan. These substances caused the intoxicated insects to stagger sleepily and then appear to doze.

Usenet-style taxonomy flame
The colorful Benjamin Dann Walsh's "acerbic pen" produced this great denunciation of a colleague who used an older name for a species rather than the accepted one.

To my mind the naturalist who rakes out of the dust of old libraries some long-forgotten name and demands that it shall take the place of a name of universal acceptance, ought to be indicted before the High Court of Science as a public nuisance, and on conviction sent to a Scientific Penitentiary and fed there for the whole remaining term of his scientific life upon a diet of chinch bugs and formic acid.

There are wonderful short sections on the name of Charles De Geer, who was so often misnamed that the Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society published a ten-page paper called "On the Rendering of Charles De Geer's Surname", and on the uses of grasshopper genitalia in classification. Also, it says a grasshopper's chewing muscles are so powerful they would crush its head if there weren't intrusions of the exoskeleton into the head to create girders. Which rules.

(I've had a hell of a headache all day, so I'm going to bed now. Good night!)

hopperdozer a pan or sled smeared with coal tar, and dragged slowly through a field, to control grasshoppers. burglar's plaster treacled brown paper, used to muffle breaking glass. oustiti a pliers-like tool used from the outside to turn a lock which has the key in the inside. [Fr., /oustiti/, < /wistiti/ marmoset, named (by Buffon) imitatively of its cry.]] loid a flexible (celluloid) strip used to push back a spring-latch lock. hookum-snivey an imposture; a device for unbolting a door from the outside.