The BBC has a video up today showing how certain plant species communicate with other individual plants by releasing a gas when attacked, triggering the other plants to begin producing a toxin to ward off predators. The video illustrates this phenomenon with Arabidopsis plants, although the video implies that other plants do this as well.
BBC News - How plants warn each other of danger (ht: reddit)
The use of the word "language" to describe this phenomenon is certainly a stretch, but maybe it isn't any more of a stretch than using the word "language" to describe the scent-based communication system of ants. Since we usually spend a day on animal communication in our intro Linguistics courses, I think it'd be fun to include a couple of minutes on plant communication as well.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Friday, December 17, 2010
Coffea Brasiliae Fulcrum
The Winking Lizard Tavern on Coventry has a sign above the door that reads "Coffea Brasiliae Fulcrum". Why such a sign exists, and why it is here, I don't know. But since I'm sitting here with my laptop and limited conversation opportunities, I thought I'd do my best to figure out what it means.
It's Latin, and my initial Googling led me to the idea that coffea brasiliae should be the taxonomic name for a coffee species (a la coffea arabica; coffea is a genus). But I guess that properly such a species should be named coffea brasilica, and besides that, there is no record anywhere on the internet that such a species exists
Most of us remember the word fulcrum from high school physics, where it specifies the point around which a lever rotates. According to Lewis & Short, a fulcrum is "the post or foot of a couch," from the verb fulcio meaning "to prop up". The OED gives us a similar definition, "a prop or support" for the English word. So, re-analyzing the phrase, I'm left with something like, "coffee is the bed-post of Brazil"; I can't really think of an appropriate translation for fulcrum in this context, but I feel like something like "coffee is the foundation of Brazil" gets the desired point across.
In fact, "coffea brasiliae fulcrum" is a (semi)famous quote from the Brazilian historian Afonso d'Escragnolle Taunay -- although you'd have a hard time figuring this out on the web if you don't read Portuguese (and, I suspect, even if you did). The quote, attributed to Alfonso, appears at the beginning of the text of an article entitled "Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development in Brazil" by Mauricio A. Font, that I dug up on JSTOR. I'm not sure the origin of the quote, but Taunay seems best known for his book, História do café no Brasil.
So, who cares? Knowing the origin and meaning (roughly) of the quotation still doesn't answer how it ended up on a sign, and how that sign ended up on the wall of a bar in Cleveland. But in case anyone in the future decides to google the phrase "coffea brasiliae fulcrum", maybe this post will be useful in addition to the five, mostly Portuguese, sites that currently pop up on a Google search.
It's Latin, and my initial Googling led me to the idea that coffea brasiliae should be the taxonomic name for a coffee species (a la coffea arabica; coffea is a genus). But I guess that properly such a species should be named coffea brasilica, and besides that, there is no record anywhere on the internet that such a species exists
Most of us remember the word fulcrum from high school physics, where it specifies the point around which a lever rotates. According to Lewis & Short, a fulcrum is "the post or foot of a couch," from the verb fulcio meaning "to prop up". The OED gives us a similar definition, "a prop or support" for the English word. So, re-analyzing the phrase, I'm left with something like, "coffee is the bed-post of Brazil"; I can't really think of an appropriate translation for fulcrum in this context, but I feel like something like "coffee is the foundation of Brazil" gets the desired point across.
In fact, "coffea brasiliae fulcrum" is a (semi)famous quote from the Brazilian historian Afonso d'Escragnolle Taunay -- although you'd have a hard time figuring this out on the web if you don't read Portuguese (and, I suspect, even if you did). The quote, attributed to Alfonso, appears at the beginning of the text of an article entitled "Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development in Brazil" by Mauricio A. Font, that I dug up on JSTOR. I'm not sure the origin of the quote, but Taunay seems best known for his book, História do café no Brasil.
So, who cares? Knowing the origin and meaning (roughly) of the quotation still doesn't answer how it ended up on a sign, and how that sign ended up on the wall of a bar in Cleveland. But in case anyone in the future decides to google the phrase "coffea brasiliae fulcrum", maybe this post will be useful in addition to the five, mostly Portuguese, sites that currently pop up on a Google search.
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