Teddy bears were introduced in 1902 and named after President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt after he went on a hunting trip to Mississippi. The politician, who loved to hunt, went to shoot bears, but not many were left. Some batty locals tried to help by offering him a baby cub, but Teddy preferred bigger game. Cartoonist Clifford Berryman drew an editorial cartoon of the episode, which gave Rose and Morris Mitchom of the Ideal Company the notion to manufacture little toy bears dressed like Roosevelt. Most teddy bears eventually went au naturel.
A koala is a marsupial, not a bear (nor is a panda), but the cognomen “koala bear” persists. One of the most famous advertising mascots of the late 20th century was the koala sitting in a tree bemoaning the impending surge of tourists to its native habitat due to Quantas’ low airfares to Australia. “I hate Quantas,” he grumbled. (Quantas stands for Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services.)
Though bears are large and often ferocious, as fictional characters they are beloved, for example, Paddington Bear, Winnie the Pooh, Baloo, Fozzie Bear, Yogi Bear (and Booboo too!). Likewise the most famous live bear, Smokey, the scourge of arsonists.
Squirrels
A squirrel is a cute tree-dwelling rodent with a bushy tail, famous for “squirreling” away nuts for later consumption and, partly due to its quick, seemingly erratic movements, for being “squirrely”—kooky or eccentric when applied to a human. The reason a squirrel moves its head from side to side before jumping is that it can’t see straight ahead clearly; rather, its eyes allow it to see above, below and behind it without moving its head. The phrase nutty as a squirrel also reflects its penchant for nuts and seeds; however, squirrels are very methodical and well-adapted creatures.
Squirrel is used in the names of other members of the same family, for instance a ground squirrel.
A squirrel cage is a rotating cylindrical cage in which a small animal, like a hamster, can exercise on a treadmill. It’s also a type of rotor in small electric motors that resembles a squirrel cage.
A squirrel monkey is a South American simian minus a prehensile tail that nonetheless leaps from tree to tree with the greatest of ease.
A squirrelfish is a brightly colored, big-eyed fish dwelling around reefs in warm seas. Its name reflects somebody’s opinion that its eyes and the sound it makes resemble those of a squirrel.
Kellogg’s created a character named Sugar Pops Pete to advertise its Sugar Pops cereal. Pete spoke with a whistle and used pistols to puff up the corn cereal with sugar, singing, “Oh, the pops are sweeter and the taste is new. They’re shot with sugar, through and through.” Pete was meant to be a ground squirrel, but the artist who drew him had no picture or photo for reference, so Pete was widely mistaken for a teddy bear! (Today the Pete-less cereal is named Corn Pops.)
Beaver. . .
Related to squirrels but bigger and amphibious, beavers are among the most intelligent and industrious of animals—hence, eager beavers. They build their own houses, canals, and dams up to about 1,500 feet in length. Propped on their hind legs, they can gnaw around and around a tree up to 18 inches or 46 centimeters in diameter until it falls. Beavers’ prominent front teeth led to nicknaming some male children “Beaver,” for example, Theodore Cleaver on TV’s Leave It to Beaver. (A beaver is also a boy of six or seven affiliated with the Scout Association.)
Beavers alternate layers of mud, stone, and wood, cut by themselves, until a dam is tall enough. Dams enclose beavers’ aquatic-vegetation food supply (water lilies, also wood, are favorite meals) and protect their communal house, known as a lodge, which has two underwater passages and doorways that lead to a main accommodation room and an area that’s a larder or food store. Beavers are ever on the lookout for leaks, plugging up holes with mud and sticks. Most animals adapt to their environment, but beavers, like humans, considerably alter theirs.
Fortunately, beaver cloth merely resembles beaver fur and is a heavy woolen cloth. Beaver lamb is lambskin made to resemble beaver fur.
Beaver is also the lower part of the face guard of a helmet in a suit of armor (in Hamlet, Horatio says of the prince of Denmark’s father’s ghost, “. . . he wore his beaver up”).
Beaver is an obsolete term for a bearded man. In the early 20th century children would sometimes call out, “Beaver!” when they spotted a man with a beard.
Beaverboard is any type of fiber board.
Due to a beaver’s thick brown fur, beaver is slang for a well-haired pudendum, especially a woman’s, and a beaver shot in pornography is a photograph of same. The 1984 US presidential election included the first-ever female candidate for vice-president, Geraldine Ferraro, and Walter Mondale. Opponents of the Democratic ticket printed bumper stickers referring to “Wally and the Beaver” (Wally Cleaver was Theodore’s elder brother).
Among the best-known commercials of early television were those for Ipana toothpaste—formerly tooth powder—starring cute bucktoothed Bucky Beaver. In each ad, he would be confronted by D. K. Germ, a gray blob representing tooth decay, whom Bucky would fight by whipping out his tube of Ipana and knocking the big germ down. Despite the beaver’s popularity and the prominence of Ipana, both are long gone.
I’ve Seen the Elephant
This ominous-sounding phrase was current in North America in the early and mid 1800s, particularly among settlers moving westward. The phrase could stand alone or be followed by: and I’ve heard the owl and I’ve been to the other side of the mountain. It asserted that the speaker wasn’t a greenhorn, was somebody who’d been around, and had even faced danger. In those days, if you’d seen something as rare as an elephant, you’d seen plenty, brother (and sister too).
The word trunk was first used to describe a tree’s main stem in the 1400s. The first use of trunk for an elephant’s prehensile nose was in a 1565 translation by Richard Eden, whose specialty was books about geography, navigation, and travel.
White Elephant
In Siam, now Thailand, white elephants were rare and prized and automatically belonged to the king, as black swans still officially belong to the British monarch. White elephants were not to be worked or ridden, and so, though revered, were virtually useless. A royal custom developed whereby a subject who displeased the king was given a white elephant as a gift he could not refuse but had to care for. Such a “gift” could ruin someone financially. Siam was one of few Southeast Asian countries not conquered by the British or French, but the phrase was taken back to the UK in the mid 1700s and applied to expensive but useless buildings or monuments.
Of Mice and Memories
Contrary to myth, elephants are not afraid of mice. They fear only humans and—because they can kill baby elephants—lions and tigers. Elephants, who have poor eyesight, rely more on their sense of smell, and a mouse doesn’t smell enough to concern an elephant. The myth began, like so many things, with the ancient Greeks, who spun a tale about a mouse that crawled up an elephant’s trunk and drove the poor pachyderm insane. (Pachyderm means thick-skinned.)
An average elephant weighs between 5,000 and 14,000 pounds and consumes 300 to 500 pounds of vegetation daily. An elephant’s trunk has over 40,000 muscles and is sensitive enough to pick up a rhinestone. Elephant brains, the largest of any land-based animal, are four times the size of a human brain.
It’s been said that an elephant never forgets. But how much does an elephant have to remember? Elephants, like bulls, have been known to carry a grudge, and have longer memories than several mammals—they also live longer than most. According to Sri Lankan animal trainer Chana Bandaranaike, “Elephants are strong but sensitive, sometimes even delicate. . . . It is exciting and showman-like to exaggerate. But to say they never forget . . . even people forget.”
Pachyderms
Elephantine describes elephants but also denotes largeness or, unfairly, clumsiness.
Elephantiasis is a grim Third World condition in which a limb, usually a leg, swells to elephant-like size due to vessel blockage by large parasitic worms.
; A rogue elephant deserts the herd and conventional behavior, venting anger and destruction on all sides.
An elephant bird (Aepyornis) was a large flightless bird from Madagascar, now extinct.
An elephant seal is a large seal with an inflatable snout and very thick neck found on North America’s west coast and around Antarctica.
An elephant shrew is a small insect-eating African mammal with a rat-like tail, long hind legs, and—thus, its name—a long mobile snout.
Elephant grass is very tall, hardy tropical African grass.
Pink elephants are what some people think they see during withdrawal (cold turkey or otherwise) from alcohol.
In 1960 General Mills introduced a cereal called Twinkles. To advertise it they chose an orange elephant named Twinkles, taken from a Saturday morning cartoon show called King Leonardo and His Subjects. Each cereal box had a small multi-page storybook about Twinkles built into its back panel. Kids loved the stories. More than the cereal. GM discontinued the cereal and the elephant.
(Sometimes kids ask, especially after attending the circus, can elephants jump? Basically, no. Because of their size and strength, elephants have no natural predators and don’t need to jump. Sadly, the only animal that routinely kills elephants is man.)
A Mountain Out of a Molehill
The original wording was to make an elephant out of a fly, via the Greek satirist Lucian, who lived at the beginning of the Common Era. But in 1548 Nicholas Udall published Paraphrase of Erasmus, which included his opinion that “Sophists of Greece could through their copiousness make an elephant of a fly and a mountain of a molehill.” Only the latter part of his sentence has survived into modern times.
Humble Pie
To eat humble pie is to declare one is wrong, whether one believes it or not (as to a boss, parent, etc.), or apologize for something said or done. The expression dates back to medieval times—explain to friends who think medieval’s second half means evil that eval means time, for example, coeval means existing at the same time or someone your own age. In those days, after a deer hunt the choicest meat was served to the male head of the household, his relatives, and guests, with the rest going to servants and lesser or uninvited guests. Those parts—kidneys, liver, and heart—were called numbles or umbles and were baked into pies. Eventually numble and umble were confounded with humble. The names of these edible deer entrails comes from Latin lumbus, loin, which is also the root of lumbar, pertaining to the lower back.
Humble pie is symbolic, unlike shoofly pie, whose name reflects its being an open sugar pie with molasses filling that attracts flies which one has to keep shooing away.
Musk. . .
Musk, a major ingredient in perfumery, is a potently aromatic reddish-brown substance secreted by the male musk deer. “Musk” may have derived from the Sanskrit—nearly all European languages are members of the Indo-European linguistic family—muska, or scrotum, due to the similar shape of the deer’s abdominal sac where musk is produced. Musk deer are a small East Asian deer without antlers.
The word musk is attached to animals and plants that smell musky—like the musk plant, related to the red or yellow monkey flower. (Nothing to do with musketeers, though the famous men’s cologne Aramis is named after one of Alexandre Dumas’s literary Musketeers.)
Once famous for its fashionable fur, the muskrat is a big semi-aquatic North American rodent that smells musky, while a musk ox is no ox, but a big goat-antelope with a horny projection on its head and a shaggy coat convenient for living in the tundra of North America and Greenland (whose name, as most readers know, is from colonial advertising rather than geographical fact).
The musk rose is also big, a musk-scented white rambling rose. (“Ramble” is said to be related to an Old Dutch word, rammelen, which referred to animals that “wander about on heat.”)
Musquash is another name for muskrat, but in Britain means muskrat fur.
(Why do deer remain transfixed by an oncoming car’s headlights? Stillness, a universal fear response, affords time to decide whether to fight or flee, though too much time may be fatal. Freezing is also a means to avoid detection—run, and the predator will pursue. Occasionally the unchallenged aggressor simply goes away.)
Buck and Naked
Buck, the male of certain animals, particularly deer, is from Olde English buc, a male deer, of Germanic origin and related to bucca, male goat. However, in South Africa a buck is an antelope of either sex.
A buck is also a vertical jump in which a horse lowers its head, arches its back and throws its back legs out behind.
The verb buck means to resist—such as to buck a trend. The adjective denotes the lowest of a given US military rank, like a buck private. The noun buck means responsibility, as in the phrases the buck stops here or passing the buck.
A buck, origin unknown, is a US dollar, also an Australian or New Zealand dollar, a South African rand, or an Indian rupee.
To buck someone up is to cheer them up. To buck up also means to become more hard-working or serious about something.
A buckboard is or was a North American four-wheeled, open horse-drawn carriage with seating attached to a plank between the front and rear axles.
A buck used also to mean a fashionable and daring young man, and before that a black male slave. Buck naked is said to derive from the related words buck and buff, the color of a buckskin and supposedly the pale tan color of European skin.
Buff, actually a yellowish beige color or a pad or cloth used to polish something, comes from French and Italian words born of the Latin for buffalo. When somebody is buffed, they’re in great physical shape (often via a gym), and in the buff is slang for naked. Butt naked emphasizes the nudity.
Buffalo comes from a Greek word meaning antelope and wild ox. Due to the animal’s size and temperament, to buffalo someone means to intimidate them. Also to trick or fool them, arising from US hunters’ practice in the 1870s of sneaking up close enough to a herd to be able to pick individuals off.
Skunk
Odd that although a skunk’s signature trait is the foul odor it protectively emits via its anal glands, when a human is called a skunk it hasn’t to do with smell but moral quality. The Latin name of the skunk, a member of the weasel family, is Mephitis mephitis, or noxious exhalation, related to Mephistopheles, the devil or evil spirit to whom Faust sold his soul in the German legend.
To skunk someone is US slang meaning, per the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, to “defeat or get the better of, especially by an overwhelming margin.”
Skunk is also short for skunkweed, cannabis that includes a high concentration of narcotic agents. Skunk cabbage is a North American arum whose flowers frankly stink.
Skunkworks is a nickname for a small experimental laboratory or department of a company or organization, inspired by the Skonk Works, an illegal still in the once-popular comic strip “Li’l Abner.”
Most of what little we know about skunks comes from cartoons. Skunks themselves are clean animals and don’t stink—what they spray stinks. Some skunks give a warning of three stomps before they spray what they think is an aggressor. Courteous? Perhaps, but adult male skunks have been known to kill young skunks. Something Pepe le Pew would never do, n’est-ce pas?
Pepe’s last name is no coincidence. In English, when something smells foul, we say p.u. In Latin, puteo means to stink, and the Indo-European word-root pu (also as in poo) denotes rot or decay. Several languages have words referring to bad smells that start with p-u. P.u., neither an abbreviation nor an acronym, became a word in the United States some time in the mid 20th century.
NON-MAMMALS
On Wings
Perhaps the animal most envied by humans, apart from a poodle on a pillow, is the bird, with its near-magical ability to fly. Numerous expressions have arisen around wings, most of them derived positionally after the horizontal projections from a main part that parallel a bird’s wings. For instance, the wings of a building or theatrical stage. The latter produ
ced the expression “to wing it,” as in an unprepared actor trying to memorize lines while standing in the wings, then improvising on stage.
Today the phrase, which began in the late 1800s, doesn’t usually involve a thespian. It took a long time to go wide; the November 1959 issue of Esquire magazine defined wing for its readers as “do something without preparation.” A second current meaning is to adapt as one goes along, as in “I’ll propose my version, see what the boss says, then wing it.”
In the wings means ready for action or use when called or needed.
Wingbeat and wingspan are self-evident, as is on the wing, while on a wing and a prayer indicates almost no chance of success. Children as well as young birds stretch or try their wings, and kids may wear water wings in a swimming pool while learning to swim.
An older person may take a younger one under their wing, mentoring the youth and offering winged words, that is, appropriate or significant ones. The elder may wear a wing collar, whose turned-down corners resemble little bird wings, and wingtip shoes, whose toecap and sides call to mind (well, some minds) a wing.
(A word for the younger person is the older one’s protégé, protected in French.)
A Dole of Doves
As with the famous but non-specific gaggle of geese, there are names for groups of specific animals. Some avian examples:
- a dole of doves
- a wedge of swans
- a bouquet of pheasants
- a charm of finches
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