🦋 Wood-ear
 Justin Erik Halldór Smith has posted a fine essay on the names of mushrooms -- names fraught, at least in the cultures of Western Europe, with references to death and sickness, names richly and comicly multifarious; names which are "just folk terms, and so, since the beginning of the 18th century anyway, are not the real names of anything. Or at least that's what we're supposed to believe."
Found via a link at LanguageHat, where the discussion in comments is lively and worth while as always.
 Elsewhere: John L. Trapp's preliminary catalog of bracket fungi in Berrien Co., Michigan, includes a lovely photo of a wood-ear mushroom called "Dryad's Saddle."
posted evening of Tuesday, June 7th, 2011
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