Magawa the rat is retiring from his job detecting landmines. In his long and distinguished career, this gold-medalist creature has sniffed out dozens of landmines and other explosives in Cambodia. (www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57345703)
Magawa is special, but even ordinary rodents are smarter than some humans. They have inspired poems. Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse” tells us: “The best-laid schemes of mice and men / Go oft awry.”
They do. And best-laid landmines kill and maim decades after they have been planted. I propose a journalistic standard that whenever someone writes an article about landmines somewhere, they should also mention who put them there in the first place.
Also, I propose that after a person steps on a landmine, if they survive, when they hobble out of the hospital on crutches, a representative of the armament factory meets them at the hospital gate and presents them with a certificate of authenticity. It’s the least they can do.
On the other hand, why worry about all this? Phnom is probably the wrong religion and going to hell anyway. And if she didn’t want her legs blown off, why did she choose to be born in the wrong country? Why did she pick the wrong skin color? And, above all, why did she go out to play in the open instead of staying in the nicely fenced and manicured backyard in her home?
Fortunately, treaties are in place banning landmines, but some countries have not signed on. No, we haven’t maimed and killed enough people yet. H. sapiens,* literally “wise man”. Wise indeed! Can we rename ourselves to something else? What happened to the truth-in-advertising laws? I propose H. nesciens or H. malevolens.
Enough about humans and their despicable actions. Sometimes it takes a rat like Magawa to clean up after humans. This week we’ll feature five words derived from rats and mice.
*We are so wise that if I spell out the H in H. sapiens this email would be blocked by email filters at many schools and corporations as containing a slur. Because smart computers! High-tech! AI! If these email nannies were any smarter, they would filter out “landmines”.
Today’s word is myology, from myo-/my- (muscle), from Greek mys (mouse, muscle). Ultimately from the Indo-European root mus- (mouse, muscle), which also gave us mussel (a respelling of muscle), mustelid (any member of the weasel family), and mysticete (baleen whale), from Greek ho mus to ketos (literally: the mouse, the whale so called). Earliest documented use: c. 1649.
NOTES:
What does a muscle have to do with a mouse? Some thought a flexing muscle (especially of the upper arm) resembled the movement of a mouse. Note that myopia has nothing to do with mice. Rather it’s from Greek myein (to shut) + ops (eye), referring to the squinting of a myopic person. That said, people have used the term myopia as if relating to the mouse and used the term mouse-sight as a synonym for myopia.
Learn more at: wordsmith.org/words/myology.html
