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> Walking the shoreline and wading into the sea in her long skirts, she fell in love with one of Earth’s most alien life-forms: the small sepia-like octopus Arg

• snthpy 4y ago
  Same here
  • IncRnd 4y ago
    Same here, too
• adrian_b 4y ago
  Actually the current name "Argonauta argo" is taken directly from the Argonauts from Greek mythology. The Ancient Greeks used the name "nautilos" for it. Confusingly, now the name "Nautilus" is used for a completely unrelated genus of cephalopods. While many biologists or mineralogists who have coined scientific names for animals, plants or minerals have taken Greek or Latin words from ancient authors, like Pliny the Elder, Aristotle or Theophrastus, most of them have been too lazy to actually read the old books. Because of that, while most ancient names of animals, plants and minerals have been reused in the modern scientific terminology, many of them have very different meanings now, which occasionally confuses those who browse some old books, from Antiquity or from the Middle Ages, where the original meanings of the words are used. Because the philologists are usually ignorant about biology and mineralogy, the dictionaries of ancient languages frequently contain erroneous definitions for the words denoting animals, plants or minerals, so they are not very helpful.