medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Saturday, December 24, 2005, at 5:13 am, John Briggs wrote:
> Ann Ball wrote:
> > What is the world is an anatid? (cartoon animal, I guess,
> although my
> > dictionary didn't have the word. Of course, I should most likely
> get> a new one since mine went to college with me and is sadly out of
> > date.)
>
> It would seem to be a fairly loose reference to the family Anatidae
> -
> swimming birds having heavy short-legged bodies and bills with a
> horny tip.
Actually, it's a quite specific reference to members of the family
Anatidae. Searches in Google just now for 'anatid' and for 'anatids'
brought up about a thousand instances. Not nearly as many as for
'murid' (four hunded thousand; includes numerous instances of an
unrelated Islamic term) or even for 'bovid' (46,900) but not a _rara
avis_ either. Biologically informed discourse in contemporary English
regularly uses words of this formation as compendious alternatives to
'members of the family X'.
Best again,
John Dillon
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