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Good morning to you. I am glad you are here.
Let us begin with the word of the day:
LEIOTRICHOUS
Having straight hair.
Don't expect to find this word turning up in your newspaper any day soon, as it is now rare to the point of complete disuse. It comes from Greek leios, smooth, plus trikhos, hair.
That it exists at all is due to the French naturalist Baron Jean Baptise Genevieve Marcellin Bory de Saint-Vincent, who travelled the world at the beginning of the nineteenth century studying plants. He also made a stab at classifying peoples into races. He is now hardly remembered, but in a once-influential book Homo: essai zoologique sur le genre humain, published in Paris in 1827, he attempted to classify humans with straight and wavy hair into the Leiotrichi and those with woolly or tufted hair into the Ulotrichi, with many sub-groups below these headings.
His classification was seriously studied for several decades, being quoted — for example — by both Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin. The adjective ulotrichous (Greek oulos, woolly), from his other main category is also rare, but the related lissotrichous, smooth-haired, is still to be found in the vocabulary of some specialists, especially zoologists; this comes from Greek lissos, which also means smooth. A third category is that of wavy-haired or cymotrichous people (from Greek kuma, wave). These last three adjectives have been used to classify types of hair, for example in forensic identification.
Written by: Michael Quinion@ World Wide Words
Todays Questions:
1) What city offered the first pay toilets, in 1865 ?
2) What was 11th-century Spanish military leader Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar better known as ?
3) What sitcom popularized the line, "Up your nose with a rubber hose" ?
4) What was the first nation to picture Albert Einstein on banknotes ?
5) What U.S. state was the destination for the Nova Scotians expelled in 1755's Grand Derangement?
