In honor of the recent birth of my second grandchild, I thought I’d look at some words related to newborns. Here are a few with interesting stories.

• Fontanelle: A fontanelle is a gap in the skull of a newborn where the bones haven’t yet grown together. A newborn’s head features several fontanelles in various locations, but the big, roughly diamond-shaped one on top (AKA the soft spot) is the most noticeable. Unnerving as it can be when new parents feel this one, or notice that sometimes it pulses gently, it’s a perfectly normal (and quite tough) anatomical feature that allows the skull to flex during birth and then deform to accommodate the rapidly growing brain after birth. By the time a child is two, the fontanelles have generally all closed. Fontanelle was originally used to mean the hollow between two muscles (I assume this refers to the indentation that appears on the skin covering the muscles), which resembles the low spot from which an underground spring issues. That explains why it comes from the Old French word fontenele, which refers to a small spring or fountain (it’s the diminutive of fontaine, or spring).

• Meconium: AKA baby’s first poop. Before a newborn’s digestive system gets to work on milk, it must process the things that went in before birth, which include amniotic fluid, bile, and mucus. The result is meconium, a dark green substance that is notoriously sticky and tarry, and that most babies excrete for their first day or so on the outside. It’s a lot harder to clean up than normal baby poop, which makes those first few diaper changes more challenging than most of the ones that come after. Meconium is derived from the Greek word for opium, or poppy-juice, mekonion, because the dark green color of the two substances is similar. (Do stories of newborn always get around to poop eventually?)

• Lanugo: Another component of meconium is called lanugo, which is a fine down that covers an unborn baby’s body. The word lanugo is derived from the Latin word for down or wool, lana, which we also see in lanolin, the name for the greasy stuff that comes from sheep’s wool. A baby typically sheds its lanugo several weeks before birth, and the fine down is released into the amniotic fluid, which the baby drinks. (I know, ewww, but we all did it.)

I recently finished an editing assignment that had to do with the bones and musculature of the hand. The bones of the fingers (and the toes, as it turns out) are collectively called the phalanges. They’re individually identified by which finger or toe they belong to and by their position. The proximal phalanx is the first one out from the center of the body (or more immediately, from the hand or the foot), the intermediate phalanx is the next one out, and the distal phalanx is the bone at the end of the finger or toe. The thumb and the big toe have only proximal and distal phalanges. I did not know that my little toes have three bones each.

Note that the singular of phalanges is phalanx. You may be familiar with this as an army formation used by the ancient Greeks in which several rows of soldiers stand close-packed side by side—just like the close-packed rows of finger bones and toe bones do, hence their name.

The word proximal is related to proximity, which both come from the Latin root proximus, meaning nearest or next. In anatomy, it’s used to describe something that is closer to the center of the body or some other point of origin, such as where a muscle attaches. Distal was formed from distant plus the suffix –al to describe something that’s furthest away from wherever the zero point is.

Distal was modeled after other anatomical terms: proximal, obviously, but also ventral and dorsal, among others. Your dorsal side is your back side; in Latin, dorsum means back. In the square dance step do-si-do, partners briefly dance back to back, which is what the original French term dos-à-dos means. The phrase was weathered down to do-si-do by English speakers.

Dorsal can also refer to the side of a particular organ or structure that is closer to the back, in humans and other animals. Note that in a quadruped or a fish, the dorsal side of something, or a dorsal structure, is going to be at the top, not the rear (think dorsal fin). This is why the upper surfaces of the hands and feet are called the dorsal surfaces. (I’ll try to remember to use this the next time I drop something on my foot.)

Your ventral side is your front side, or the side where your belly is. The Latin word for belly is venter, which made it into French and Spanish as ventre and vientre, respectively. The Frence phrase ventre à terre is sometimes used in English. This idiom translates literally as belly to the ground, and if you’re traveling ventre à terre, you’re going very fast indeed.

Before Eadward Muybridge’s freeze-frame snapshots of running horses, an artistic convention for indicating that a horse was galloping flat out was to show the animal with its front legs reaching out in front of it and its hind legs stretched out behind it, as if the horse was in mid-leap; this left its belly closer to the ground: ventre à terre. Muybridge, of course, showed how a horse really gallops.

It’s possible that my dreams will be haunted by armies of fingers, but I’m hoping for square dancing or even galloping horses instead.

Woolly worm season is upon us. The other day I spotted one of these fuzzy caterpillars behind my car, and I moved it to avoid backing over it. Woolly worms were one of the many surprises that awaited me when I moved to Indiana. The first one I ever saw was hitching a ride on a letter I was pulling out of the mailbox; it surprised me considerably, not least because I’d never seen anything like it in the desert where I came from, and certainly not in the mailbox.

What it was doing there I’ll never know, but it was probably looking for a peaceful dark place to spend the winter. The woolly worm is the larva of the Isabella tiger moth, Pyrrharctia isabella. It’s also called the banded woolly bear. The second generation of each year overwinters as caterpillars, generating their own antifreeze to protect themselves from damage due to freezing, and pupates in the spring, becoming a nondescript pale orange moth.

The caterpillar, on the other hand, has a distinctive pattern of coloration, appearing a coppery orange in the middle and black at the ends. The width of the central band varies, and folk wisdom says that it indicates how severe the coming winter will be. However, this is no more than a charming folktale, autumn’s counterpart to Groundhog Day. The width of the stripe varies with the age of the caterpillar and how well it has eaten.

Many of the tiger moths have fuzzy caterpillars. These moths belong to a family called Arctiidae, although some taxonomists have proposed rearranging the family tree so that they belong to the subfamily Arctiinae in the family Erebidae. Either way, the family or subfamily takes its name from the Greek word arktos, or bear, because the caterpillars are collectively known as woolly bears.

We also see this Greek root in the word arctic, which comes from arktikos, meaning of the bears. The bears here are the northern constellations that today go by the Latin names Ursa Major and Ursa Minor; they contain the Big and Little Dippers. There’s also a star called Arcturus; the name can be translated as the Guardian of the Bears, and evidently was given to the star for its position in the sky not too far from the starry Ursae. It’s just another example of the wide range of some Greek roots.

Learn more:

• If you look closely, the Isabella tiger moth is not really all that nondescript.
• The National Geographic has a gallery of photos from woolly worm festivals.

Sometimes it seems like everything is named for a resemblance to something else. This is a story of the similarity-based links among two flowers, three birds, and a cetacean. Oh, yes: and an amphibian.

I recently read a short story in which a New England matron establishes a garden club in her town because she’s the local expert in delphiniums and lilies. By the magic of associative thinking, the constellation of Delphinus, the dolphin, sprang readily to my mind when I saw the word delphinium. What, I wondered, could possibly link the two? (Delphinus itself, a small constellation in the summer sky, is shaped like an elongated diamond; like most other constellations, it requires a good deal of imagination to see the thing it’s named for.)

The flower, as it turns out, is called delphinium, after the Latin word for dolphin, because the nectary (where the nectar comes from) sticks out behind the flower and is somewhat curved, resembling the sleek curvy front end of a dolphin. The back side of the flower, in other words, looks like the front side of the dolphin. Multiple flowers appear on a single stalk, each with a more or less extravagant projection behind it.

This would be the end of the story, except that the delphinium is also called the larkspur, because that nectary projecting out the back side also resembles the projecting structure called a spur on a lark’s foot. (Technically, larkspur is used to refer to flowers in the genus Delphinium and also to some in the genus Consolida, We will leave Consolida for another day.)

This brings us to the other flower, the columbine (genus Aquilegia), which is named for not one but (possibly) two birds. These lovely airy blooms that dance in the spring breezes have inspired a number of imaginative comparisons. Aquilegia may come from aquila, the Latin word for eagle, because the flowers resemble the claw of an eagle. (Coincidentally, the constellation of Aquila appears not too far from Delphinus in the sky.) An alternative explanation is that Aquilegia comes from the Latin word for water bearer, because each part of the distinctive flower looks like an amphora, or water jug; amphorae typically had a pointed end that could be placed in soft earth to hold the jug upright.

The second bird this flower is named for is the dove, columba in Latin, because the flower as a whole is thought to resemble a group of doves. If the eagle story is true, this flower is named for both the warlike eagle and the peaceful dove.

At this point in my research, I became aware of a dim memory stirring in the back of my mind: Don’t some churches have something called a columbarium? They do, and it’s not where they keep the doves. It’s a place for the proper storage of funeral urns containing the ashes of the dead. However, the urns are stored in an arrangement of compartments that is similar to that used in a dovecote.

Oh yes: the amphibian. The columbine and the delphinium are both members of the Ranunculaceae family. The family takes its name from the ranunculus, which in turn takes its name from the Latin for little frog. The resemblance here is not visual; like frogs, ranunculus like to live near water.

It’s easy to talk about science or its history in the abstract, especially when you’re thinking about long stretches of time, and to lose sight of what it means to actually do science. So I thought I’d share a video that shows scientists out doing field work.

In “Sundrops and Hawk Moths,” episode 4 of the series Plants Are Cool, Too!, host Chris Martine of Bucknell University talks with Krissa Skogen of the Chicago Botanic Garden. Skogen studies native pollinators (pollinators other than honeybees, basically), and the video shows her at work at the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. She’s looking at the interaction between the hawk moth and some primrose species at White Sands.

It’s a cool video. I’d never seen anyone unroll a moth’s proboscis and collect pollen from it, and I didn’t know that you could gather the scent from a single flower and compare it with the scent from other flowers. One of the interesting things about the moths is that they cover much greater distances than bees and don’t have any kind of a home to return to. The most evocative line in the whole video was the one about moths spreading the genes of these plants around. Not to mention that White Sands is a magical setting. Enjoy!

My son, Patrick Alexander, Postdoctoral Curator at the NMSU Department of Biology Herbarium, helped with the production of this film.

The wine harvest is nearing its end, so this seems like a good time to look at the different species of grapes that are used for wine. When I first began to take a serious interest in wine, the differences between varieties and species were very fuzzy to me. I’m still sorting out the varieties, most of which come with fascinating but confusing historical baggage involving different names depending on the place and time.

Species are easier. For starters, all types of wine grapes fall within the genus Vitis, named for the Latin word for grape vine. Within that genus, most wine grapes are varieties of Vitis vinifera, although grapes from this species are also eaten fresh or dried. This species first arose in central Europe, southwestern Asia, and the lands around the Mediterranean. Because yeast occurs naturally on the grape skins, they would ferment if left to themselves. It’s not clear when humans first discovered and exploited the products of fermentation, but they’ve been playing around with grape fermentation for a very long time.

Vinifera translates roughly from Latin as wine-bearing. Note that -fer (meaning carry or bear) is all over the place in other words: transfer (carry across), refer (carry back), Lucifer and phosphor (light-bearer; both used to be names for the morning star), and metaphor (carry over, in the sense of carrying meaning).

Vitis labrusca is a North American species that contains both varieties used for wine and varieties used in juice or jam (for example, the Concord is a V. labrusca variety).  Labrusca is the Latin word for a wild grape, and these grapes are noted for a particular earthy musky flavor. The wines they make are very grape-juicy, maybe not ultra-sophisticated but very appealing in their way. Catawba and Niagara are probably the varieties you’re mostly likely to see in wines.

Wines are also made from the North American grape Vitis aestivalis. Aestivales comes from the Latin word for summer, although it’s not clear why that name was given to this species. The cultivar Norton is thought to be the first American grape used in commercial wine production, and it’s still an important grape in Missouri and parts of the eastern US.

Vitis riparia, named from the Latin word for the riverbanks where it likes to grow, is important for wine because it is used as a root stock that provides V. vinifera grapes with genes for cold tolerance, disease resistance, and resistance to phylloxera. Another grape used as root stock is Vitis rupestris; rupestris is a botanical and zoological term that comes from Latin; it means essentially living on or near rocks and appears in other species names as well.

Phylloxera is historically one of the most notable grape pests; it swept through Europe in the late 19th century, inspiring viticulturists to use resistant root stocks and develop hybrids. In the name phylloxera, we once again encounter the Greek root phyllo (leaf), which also appear in chlorophyll and phyllosilicate. The -xera part of the name comes from a Greek word for dry; we also see it in xeroscaping (landscaping in dry areas with native desert plants) as well as xerography and Xerox (the company applied a “dry” process of photographic duplication that did not involve the use of a liquid developer). Phylloxera is a pest that sucks the sap from the roots and leaves of grape plants.

Of course, this simple picture is made tremendously more complex (and more rewarding) by the presence of so many varieties of wine grapes within the species V. vinifera, each suited to a particular climate and soil type, not to mention the existence of many hybrids. But getting into that would take a lifetime.

Learn more:

• Check out Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture, by Patrick McGovern (find in library).
• For more on the Norton grape, see The Wild Vine: A Forgotten Grape and the Untold Story of American Wine, by Todd Kliman (find in library).

I ran across the phrase renal calculus, another name for a kidney stone, and wondered whether it was related to the calculus you learn in a math class. It turns out that it is, and the link is limestone.

Calx is the Latin word for limestone; it comes from the Greek word khalix, or pebble. The diminutive form of calx in Latin, calculus, was originally used to refer to a pebble used for counting and simple calculations. The Latin word calculus thus forms the basis for the English word calculate. 

Calculus can be used in English to refer to any system of calculation using symbols, although it is used primarily for the indispensable mathematical tool developed by Leibniz and Newton in the 17th century to describe and study change. This was originally called the calculus of infinitesimals, later shortened to infinitesimal calculus; I think this is why you sometimes hear people talking about, for example, the history of the calculus instead of simply the history of calculus.

It’s obviously a short step from the pebbles used to reckon your accounts to the pebbles that cause such misery in the urinary system or in the gall bladder. Calculus is now used to refer to any type of accidental accretion in the body. Now that I think about it, I have vague recollections of puzzling over the thought of calculus on the teeth, perhaps when I was the target of a dental health campaign in grade school. Dental calculus is essentially hardened plaque, perhaps the first step on the road to gum disease. I will generously share all of what I remember learning about it: Brush! Floss!

The Latin root calx also made it into English in the name of the element calcium, which is a major constituent of limestone (and coincidentally is also found in some kidney stones). Renal, by the way, comes from the Latin word for kidney, ren.

Learn more:

• Why Do We Study Calculus? gives a brief history of calculus and its applications and explains why it’s worth learning
• Free online math courses at Open Culture
• French composer Marin Marais wrote “A Description of the Removal of a Stone” in 1725, which is thought to depict the horrors of an operation to remove a bladder stone (the first gallstone operation didn’t occur until later). This article lists the brief descriptions in the score, which are worth reading, but note that the article identifies the operation, apparently incorrectly, as a gallstone removal. 
• [Added October 23]: A friend sent links to an analysis and a performance of the Marais piece. 

The other day I was poking around online reading about rocks and dinosaurs when I should have been working, and I discovered that what I knew as the Cretaceous–Tertiary (KT) boundary is also called the Cretaceous–Paleogene (KP) boundary. (K is used instead of C to make it easier to pronounce.) You may be familiar with this boundary as marking the extinction of the dinosaurs roughly 65 million years ago. Well, one thing led to another, and I learned some interesting things about the names of recent geologic periods and epochs.

Geologists originally categorized Earth’s crustal rocks from oldest to most recent as Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, and Quaternary. Because each type was associated with a particular period in Earth’s history, you could also talk about, for example, the Tertiary period. However, most of these geological time periods have since been placed into a larger framework, broken down into finer-grained subdivisions, and given generally more informative names.

As part of this process, the Tertiary (66 million to 2.6 million years ago) and the Quaternary (2.6 million years ago to the present day) were once assigned to the Cenozoic era. (Eras are longer than periods but shorter than eons.) However, as scientists learned more about the fossils of the Cenozoic, it began to make more sense to split the Tertiary itself into two periods, the Paleogene and the Neogene, on the basis of the fossils found in rocks of each period. These names were proposed in Europe and adopted only slowly by North American geologists.

The Paleogene is the older of the two periods; the name comes roughly from the Greek phrase ancient-born. However, it’s part of the Cenozoic era, which translates more or less as recent life. (The Cenozoic is preceded by the Mesozoic and Paleozoic: middle life and ancient life, respectively.) Ceno- comes from the Greek word kainos, meaning new or recent, and we also see this root in the -cene ending in the sequence of epochs running from the Paleocene to the Holocene.

Wait, Paleocene? Wouldn’t that mean something like ancient recent? Indeed it would. Not only is the Paleogene (ancient-born) part of the Cenozoic (recent life), but the Paleocene epoch could be translated as something like the ancient recent epoch.

It actually makes perfect sense. Compared to the Paleozoic, which stretches from 541 million years ago to 252 million years ago, the Cenozoic is recent indeed. However, the Cenozoic itself contains older and more recent epochs. Imagine that you trade in your old car for a new one frequently; you may find yourself explaining to a confused friend that the Toyota was your old new car, and your new new car is a Honda. It’s something like that with the -cene epochs, all more recent than what came before but needing to be subdivided somehow according to their relative ages.

From oldest to most recent, these epochs  are the Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene. The names Paleocene and Holocene make nice bookends: the ancient recent epoch and the entirely recent epoch (holo- comes from the Greek word for whole, which we also see in holographic and holistic). The epochs in between make sense, although evidently not if you know much about Greek grammar.

Eo- comes from eos, the Greek word for dawn, and is used to describe the earliest appearance of something, in this case modern fossils. Oligo-, mio-, plio-, and pleisto- are based on Greek words ranging in meaning from few to most, and they refer to increasing numbers of modern fossils, or increasing degree of recentness. H.W. Fowler, in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage, took a very dim view of these coinages, or, as he called them, “regrettable barbarisms.” His entry for Miocene described the word as

A typical example of the monstrosities with which scientific men in want of a label for something, and indifferent to all beyond their own province, defile the language. The elements of the word are Greek, but not the way they are put together, nor the meaning demanded of the compound.

If this seems harsh, keep in mind that in the 19th century when these names were coined, every educated person was expected to have learned Greek. Fowler made this point not because he thought the words could be changed; he knew they were too well-established for that. His hope was that scientists “may some day wake up to their duties to the language—duties much less simple than they are apt to suppose.” I’m guessing that he would also find the recent coinage Anthropocene similarly wanting or perhaps even worse. However, he is not here to comment, and my more recent edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, edited by R. W. Burchfield, is far more temperate, noting that “the time has come for the hatchet to be buried. A simple irreg. suffices” to characterize these words.

The geologic time scale is a fascinating thing full of evocative names. We’ll come back to it again, I’m sure.

Learn more:

• Geologic time scale from the University of California Museum of Paleontology
• Geologic time scale article from Wikipedia (more detail on the history)
• Article on the Anthropocene from Space.com

This is one of my very favorite times of year; on sunny days, the low-angle sunlight makes the colorful leaves on the trees glow. “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” Keats wrote in his poem “To Autumn,” but it’s also the season of some interesting chemistry. To celebrate the brilliant hues of Northern Hemisphere autumn, today we’ll look at the names of the chemicals that give the leaves their color.

The green in leaves in the spring and summer comes from chlorophyll, the chemical that makes photosynthesis possible. The word chlorophyll was coined in the early 19th century. It has two Greek roots. Khloros means pale green, and phyllon means leaf. (That one also appears in phyllosilicate, which describes clay minerals with thin sheets, or leaves, of silica; it also appears in phyllo dough.)

Leaves also contain carotenoids during much of their lifetimes. These pigments provide yellow, red, and orange colors in the plant world. For example, in about six months we’ll be seeing the cheery yellow of a carotenoid in daffodils. As some fruits mature, we see the chlorophyll slowly disappear as the green fruit ripens to yellow, orange, or red. You may have heard of lycopenes or β-carotene, which are considered micronutrients in foods. (I talked about lycopenes and their unlikely etymological connection to wolves in an earlier post.) The words carotene and carotenoid come from carote, the Latin word for that iconic orange vegetable, the carrot.

Something similar to the ripening of fruit happens in leaves in the fall: as trees prepare for winter and shut down photosynthesis in their leaves, the chlorophyll fades away and the carotenoids that they contain become more obvious. In addition, some fruits and many trees also begin to produce another pigment, anthocyanin, in response to the shorter days of fall. It also contributes to the colors of the fall foliage as the chlorophyll disappears. Anthocyanin, like chlorophyll, comes from two Greek roots: anthos, for flower, and kuanos, for blue.

So now you know what sets the woods and tree-lined streets ablaze: the chlorophyll is disappearing, and the carotenoids and anthocyanin are shining forth. It goes by fast; enjoy!

Learn more:

• Fall colors page and an overview of the science behind fall colors from the US Forest Service
• Chemistry of Fall Colors from scifun.org (more detail on the chemistry)
• Centripetal Fall Colors from Earth Science Picture of the Day (why some trees change color from the top down)
• Carotenoids page at the Linus Pauling Institute’s Micronutrient Center
• In October 1862, the Atlantic published Henry David Thoreau’s essay Autumnal Tints, in which Thoreau presents his careful observations as a naturalist and builds thoughtful analogies to human life and death. It’s a beautiful autumn read.

The word muscle comes from the Latin musculus, which means little mouse. But why? It’s because the rippling movement of certain muscles under the skin was thought to resemble the movement of a mouse. My mental image—and it is not a pleasant one—is of a mouse running or moving underneath a thin rug or blanket. Although it’s an unnerving image, I can see the connection.

The Greek word mŷs can also mean either mouse or muscle; this word gives us the prefix myo-, as in myalgia (muscle pain) or myocardial infarction (damage to or death of the muscular tissue of the heart due to lack of oxygen).

While we’re looking at the human body, we can examine another unexpected connection, this one between the skeleton and arteriosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. Skeleton is ultimately derived from the Greek verb skellein, to dry up, via skeletos (dried up) and skeletos soma (dried-up body).

Skellein is related to skleros, meaning hard, a natural enough association with dried things. This made its way into Latin and then English as sclero, which is combined with other roots to form words. It appears in the the word scleroderma, for example, the name of a skin condition, often painful, in which the skin becomes hardened. And arteriosclerosis is any thickening and hardening of the arteries.

So there you have it: muscles like mice and a skeleton consisting of what’s left after everything else has dried up and blown away.

Learn more:

• Check out the skeletal system and muscular system (with all of their fascinating names) at InnerBody.com.