Personal Blogs

Death, today I felt

You sniffing round

Hoping to add me

To your scorepad.

Plague is a serious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia Pestis. It is rare nowadays but was responsible for the Great Plague of London in 1665, for example. Looking further back, most people have assumed it presented as the Black Death in the Middle Ages, but with some scholars unconvinced until relatively recently. More daringly, some have wondered if the pandemic that took place in the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian might be the same disease.

Recent work with datable human remains makes it almost curtain that Y. Pestis is indeed what caused all three of these plagues with a small ‘p’. Blood flows into a living tooth, and a pathogen in the blood may be in the teeth of a person when they die. Tooth enamel is very resistant and fragments of pathogen DNA can survive in the tooth for thousands of years.

Researchers have collected DNA samples by drilling into ancient teeth and used computers to reassemble the fragments and look for a sequence that identifies Y. Pestis. Results show that almost certainly the Great Plague of London, the Black Death, and the Justinian plague were the same thing.

And here’s a big surprise; it turns out the bacterium has been about for some 5000 years at least. But it only changed into the deadly form about 4000 years ago, when it swapped in a gene from some other bacterium.

See Ancient Plagues Shaped the World, Scientific American, November 2020.

Read tonight: “l suppose it’s power for the course.”

These all come ultimately from Latin salsa or saltus = salted. The same root gives us salt, of course, but also salary, originally a regular payment to allow purchase of salt. But further back Latin sal has common roots with Ancient Greek, ᾰ̔́λς which halide and halogen come from. And perhaps these all stem back to a word for sea. I love these connections between words.

If you love words and word origins as much as I do, you’ll enjoy the fine detective work in this blog post about codswallop.

Q. What is a ruminant?

A. An ant that lives in lodgings.

Here’s a photo my brother took. It’s a viviparous, AKA common, lizard. These lizards are unusual, because they don’t lay eggs like the majority of reptiles but give birth to live young. This individual is a juvenile.

Apparently it is the only reptile native to Ireland. According to legend St Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland, which gives rise to the following joke:

“Q. What did St Patrick say as he drove the snakes out of Ireland?

A. Are you alright in the back there, snakes?”

I got this phone call, they said “Are you interested in double glazing?” I was like “No, I think it’s totally boring.”

Q. What do you call an ant that refuses to do what it is told?

A. Defiant.

I've invested heavily in string. All my money is tied up in it.

Very sad news tonight. Apparently the world's leading expert on frogs has just croaked.