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
… (continues)

“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
… (continues)
… (continues)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