Entoma wha?

As usual, this Christmas enabled me to stock my bookshelves again, this time with a couple of excellent gifts from my lovely wife: Bugs in the System (NY: Basic Books, 1995) by May Berenbaum, and The Earwig’s Tail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009), by the same author. I have only just begun to read, but have already found a gem in each.

By order of seniority, I’ll quote from the older volume first. The topic is etymology:

The body division is the trait to which insects owe their name: Insecta derives from the Latin for “cut into,” as in “cut into pieces,” a succinct way to describe segmentation. (Entoma is from the Greek for the same thing, whence cometh “entomology”.) (10)

This very simple, easy-to-understand etymology of entomology reminds me of how difficult it can be for a lay person to truly understand a science. I trained in literature; went so far as to get a Ph.D. in the subject, but when confronted by something as vast and as interesting as the great outdoors, I neglect even those areas in which I’m trained. The first thing I should have done when deciding to learn more about insects was some etymology. Instead of learning the meta language of the subject, I tried to learn the subject first. But there’s no way to come to grips with a subject as vast as the great outdoors; even this one tiny slice of the it is far too vast.

And so I’ve read several large volumes about insects without even bothering to register the fact that the name of the class Insecta derives from the Latin description of the insect body plan, nor the fact that the name of the study of insects derives from the Greek version of the same thing. Yeesh! (Although I must admit, in my defense, that I’ve never been able to know something about a subject from just the first few sources; it’s only after getting up to speed in the conversation, recognizing the names, and so on, that I’ve been able to form my own thoughts. Maybe that’s why it took so long to get out of grad school!)

The second quote that struck me is from Berenbaum’s latest book, and its theme ties back in to that of an earlier post on this very blog, when I related Thomas Eisner’s story of his quixotic attempt to substitute cockroaches for the frogs that are sacrificed every year as laboratory subjects for introducing students to the autonomic nervous system. Berenbaum, whose sense of humor I’ve already come to admire after only a few pages, quotes E.B. White on frogs, in an attempt to explain the humor in the collection of stories she’s about to tell:

E. B. White, the brilliant writer of the arthropod-friendly Charlotte’s Web, among many other books, said about the subject, “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” I haven’t dissected a frog in decades, nor have I made a science of dissecting humor, but as an entomologist I have found insects to be an admittedly intermittent but nonetheless remarkably rich source of humor. In this book, I wrote about things that struck me as funny. I hope people are interested, and if it’s any consolation, no frogs died in the process. (ix-x)

Berenbaum’s purpose in writing the book is a lot like mine in this blog: I write about things that strike me (whether they’re funny or not), and I hope people are interested. And, if it’s any consolation, no frogs died in the process, at least by my hand. (I’ve run across squashed frogs in parking lots, and dead snakes, and a few lizard corpses, but have yet to kill a single subject of this blog. Except mosquitoes. Nasty ladies, those…)

Merry Christmas! Or, whatever holiday you celebrate, may you celebrate it well!

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