Posts tagged “TAXONOMY”
  • Thirty Vertebrate Common Names Potentially Useful As Insults
    By Chris Clarke on 2011 09 26 at 7:53:04 pm | 12 comments | Shorter URL: http://coyot.es/x0xe

    Insulting people by comparing them to animals is nothing new, but in the English language we don’t put much creativity into the practice. Most animal-name insults are short, one syllable, four letters or fewer: “Dog,” “pig,” “ass,” “cow.” And we’re

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  • Stalk drearily in the high mesas
    By Chris Clarke on 2010 07 28 at 3:30:44 pm | 7 comments | Shorter URL: http://coyot.es/x08

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    “Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. Tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the

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  • Abandoning Taxonomy
    By Chris Clarke on 2009 08 11 at 12:42:35 pm | 1 comment

    We are, all of us, abandoning taxonomy, the ordering and naming of life. We are willfully becoming poor J.B.R., losing the ability to order and name and therefore losing a connection to and a place in the living world.

    No wonder so few of us can

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