Back of the Cereal Box: fish

Showing posts with label fish. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Drs. Fish & Fish, Dermatology

You’re rich. But you have grown weary of arranging your money into variously sized piles and counting the full-length portraits of yourself wearing period costumes. Yes, even cosmetic enhancement has lost its dazzle. After all, when you finally perfected the angle of that stubborn left eyelid, you had no use for the medical perfection as it exists in Western culture. But it was then that you got weird. You began exploring the most exotic treatments money can buy — diamond-tip abrasion swabs, jacuzzi suits, tongue-lengthening massages, protein emulsions made of your own fingernails — but even then you could not be stopped. Your need to spend compelled you to rope more into your madness — more people, more services, more… species.

Then you heard of the doctor fish, the Garra ruff native to certain Middle Eastern river basins. You felt cautiously optimistic. After all you’d been burned before on that basset hound-led primal scream class. But then you researched, and then you learned something that made you throw out your towels and soap, for you would never need them again. No, not once more would you have to pain yourself to clean your body. Ever.

That’s what the fish would do now.

Yes, the doctor fish you already had being shipped to your house, and they would soon populate your outdoor freshwater rock pool, where they’d be happy with you… when they ate your scabs.

Oh, sure, it wasn’t just scabs. It was a veritable you-banquet — your scabs, yes, but also all manner of dead skin cells. If you had dandruff, it would be like an appetizer to the bounty that was all the pieces of you that you didn’t need and that you’d been carelessly casting off on the ground, where no fish at all had the opportunity to eat them. Yes, you had ushered in a new age into your life — and the lives of your loved ones, if they would only have listened to you! — that so improved on the previous state that you now split your personal timeline between the period before ichthyotherapy and the newer, better, more fish-focused golden age. And you were happy, so happy, and it didn’t bothered you in the least that everyone else simply knew you as that crazy pervert who didn’t think he had to wash himself because he instead wanted to let hundreds of tiny fish nibble all his bits.

And if my description of doctor fish was too much for you, you really don’t want to click this link to see the little guys working on a pair of feet whose toe hairs are so weirdly long that they literally span the toe and reach out to touch the adjoining toes, as if the foot itself is trying to build some sort of hair-bridge from Market Piggy to Wee Wee Wee on the far side of town.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Mister Xyster

One day I’ll find a useful word of the week that begins with “X.” One day.

xyster (ZIS-ter) — noun: a medical tool used for scraping bones.

Then again, you could well be a med student or a murderer, and this post could free you from the daily shame of having to ask colleagues for the “scrapey-scrape thing” as you go about your daily work. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, The word comes from the Greek xyein, “to scrape” and from there goes back to the Proto Indo-European base *kes-, also meaning “to scrape.” Xyster also happens to be a metal band, which shouldn’t be surprising, and part of the scientific name of the Southern banned guitarfish, also known as Zapteryx xyster. I’d guess some kind of scraping, if not outright bone-scraping, figures into this animal’s existence, not unlike the aforementioned med student or murderer. In fact, images of Zapteryx xyster are a lot easier to find online than those of the actual xyster instrument, so I’ll just give you the fish, which you should be nice to.

a scraper, not a strummer

Yes, there’s not a whole lot online about xyster, and what’s there isn’t all that interesting. Perhaps the most notable thing would be what I found on Wordnik, which helpfully noted that it was an anagram for sextry, which I didn’t know existed and which, in fact, is just a more salacious-sounding variant of sacristy. So there’s that.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009

The Lactating Fish

For those of you who read this blog and know Dina, that she supplied this week’s word should come as no surprise.

milt (milt) — noun: 1. fish semen. 2. the spleen of a domesticated animal.

Uncmmon. I feel like only those in specific professions or subcultures would have reason to refer to fish semen by its proper name. The Wiktionary definition for milt offers the word roe as a synonym. This would be true only certain circumstances: when milt isn’t referring to animal spleens and when roe isn’t referring to fish eggs or crustacean ovaries. More interesting to me, however, is the likelihood that someone — likely an older man, possibly your grandfather — is or was named Milt Roe or at least Milt Rowe, because this is now funny to me. Such men do exist, and I’ll bet they’re not aware that names refer to fish sex in two separate-but-equally hilarious ways.

Wiktionary links milt to the Old English milte, also meaning “spleen,” as well as the German and Swedish words for “spleen,” Milz and mjälte. The American Heritage Dictionary most agrees, but also suggests that milt comes from both Old English milte and a Middle Dutch word spelled exactly the same way. There’s no entry for it at the typically handy Online Etymology Dictionary. Perhaps I’m disclosing my ignorance of anatomy in revealing this, but I don’t quite understand the connection between semen and the spleen. Can anybody explain it to me?

Google Books offers another take on the etymology of milt: Reverend Abram Smythe Palmer’s 664-page Folk Etymology: A Dictionary, published in 1882. From what I’ve read, Palmer seems to debunk folk etymologies with a sense of glee. I’d like to picture him, white-haired and hunched over stacks of books, muttering and sputtering about bastardizations to his beloved English and scribbling out the etymologists’ version of a holy crusade. His book’s subtitle, “Verbal Corruptions of Words Perverted in Form of Meaning, by False Derivation of Mistaken Analogy,” gets quite close to what I imagine Palmer’s mindset was as he wrote this book.

Clear though Palmer’s ambitions may have been, however, I’m not entirely clear what he means in his entry on milt. He writes:

Milt, the soft roe of fishes, so spelt as if identical with milt, the spleen of animals, A. Sax. milte, Dan. milt, Ger. mil. It is really a corruption of milk, so called from its resemblance to curd or thick milk, as we see by comparing Dan. fisfa-melk, “fish-milk,” milt; Swed. mjolke, from mjolk, milk; Ger. milch, milk, milt.

And from this, I’m not sure whether his claiming the notion of milt and milk being related is true or rather a folk etymology. He mentions milt again in his entry on milk, however, so perhaps the former is the case. Regardless of what Palmer says, I’m not what to think, aside from that even a possible etymological connection between milk and a word for semen makes me uncomfortable in a way I’ll try to put out of my mind when I next eat cereal for breakfast.

If that’s not enough to make you feel uneasy, consider this: As we’re on “M” this week, we’re halfway through the alphabetical order I began in the first week of January. Since two runs-through of the alphabet will fit perfect in the span of one year, we are therefore one-quarter done with 2009.

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