Being both a bird watcher and a word botcher, I take my grandchildren every summer to the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park, where we usually attend “Frequent Flyers,” the famous bird show. Our family enjoys various avian species strutting their stuff on the ground, hawks swooping down from the sky and a gray parrot squawking and squeaking all sorts of sound effects.
In their ongoing narrative at the show, two of the Safari Park trainers kept pronouncing the name of the San Diego Zoological Society as ZOO-uh-LAHJ-i-kul society. After the performance, I mentioned to the two young women in private that there are two, not three, o’s in zoological so the proper sounding is ZOH-uh-LAHJ-i-kul. They told me they knew that, but had been instructed by their bosses to say ZOO-uh-LAHJ-i-kul because people wouldn’t understand the proper pronunciation. Glug! No way! Yuck!
Since 1925 the magazine published by the San Diego Zoological Society has been titled ZOONOOZ. It’s a bedazzling, beguiling and bewitching name for a periodical because it’s a palindrome, a word that reads the same forward and backward. The word also reads the same right side up, upside down and both ways in a mirror:
ZOONOOZ! ZOONOOZ! burning bright
In the forests of the night.
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy dazzling symmetry?
Topsy-turvy words like ZOONOOZ that retain their appearance even when turned upside down are called ambigrams: dip, dollop, mow, NOON, pod, SIS, suns and swims.
Whenever I am in the presence of animals, I am unable to resist making beastly puns. Recently, my three granddaughters — Maud, Lucy and Nelly — and I entered the new ring-tailed lemur exhibit in Safari Park. We were charmed by the antics of these old world primates as they climbed to the top of the enclosure and scampered on the ground, sometimes across our feet. Spotting two long lemur tails sticking up and undulating above a wall enclosing a pit, I pointed out to my descendants that we were viewing “A City of Two Tails.” (I suspect your reaction is “What the Dickens!”)
We arrived at the place where visitors feed the wild giraffes, who peek over a bluff. I turned to the guard and suggested a name for this section of the complex: GIRAFFIC PARK. Similarly, I propose that two of the elephants that grace the zoo and Safari Park be melodiously named Harry Elephante and Elephant Gerald.
What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros? Elephino!
The wild cattle that live in the park include Asian water buffalo and African or Cape buffalo. These impressive creatures inspire me to share with you one of my favorite animal etymologies:
Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is a possible sentence, and it raises the question why buffalo (from a Latin word for “wild oxen”) has become a verb denoting “to confuse, baffle, frustrate.” The answer is that, despite the slaughter of tens of millions in the United States, the animal is hard to kill individually. Buffalo are swift, tough and belligerent. They’re also powerful, which is why, when you hit the gym, use the machines and heft the weights, you get buffed.
Products made from buffalo were plentiful in the 19th century, including strips of buffalo hide that were used to bring metals to a high polish. That’s where we get the verb to buff.
Coats made from the animal’s hide were considered stylish. When the dark hair was removed, these buffcoats, as they were called, were the color of human skin, and in the buff arose as a synonym for “naked.”
Firemen of that time wore buffalo robes as their winter gear. Dandies — wealthy men who had nothing better to do than to rush to fires and watch the burning — emulated the firefighters by donning the same buffcoats. These men became known as buffs, and, by extension, a buff is anyone avidly devoted to a pursuit or hobby.
Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com