Words are strange sometimes. . .

[xiphias]

So, I was looking up information about gerbera daisies, and a site stated that they were "endemic to South Africa."

This sounded, to me, like someone didn't know what "endemic" meant.

But I was wrong. "Endemic" was precisely the word they meant to use. See, I knew that a disease was "endemic" if it was always present in a population. And I'd only ever encountered the word in epidemiology. But it turns out that it also means, in botany and zoology, "exclusively native". See, the difference between "native" and "endemic" is that a plant or animal can be native to more than one place. But a plant or animal that is native to exactly one place is "endemic" to that place.

Neat, hunh?

Comments

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Yup. Yellow-billed magpies are endemic to California.
California poppies aren't. :)

(Something like 30% of our flora and fauna is endemic.)

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

Neat, hunh?

It is. You reminded me of all the trouble I used to get into (and maybe still do) because I learned so many words connotatively. By that, I mean I came across them for the first time in stories, and that's how I learned of them. It would trip me up more in pronunciation and trying to speak them but I still have to look things up for ben to make sure I am giving him a definition and not just "Angela's definition."

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

My friend Iran and I were talking once, when we were in eighth grade, about words that had only read. She mentioned talking to someone about the "bur-goyz-ie" attitutes of the middle class; I mentioned that I had called something which was a fine example of something an "eh-pi-tohm." We then chatted about how shocked we were to discover that the "oar durves" that we'd both eaten were the same as the "horse du-vo-res" that we'd read about.

Felis Sidus has talked about a manager she used to have who owned a thesaurus but not a dictionary. They'd keep getting memos with words that just didn't quite mean what he thought they meant.

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

Very cool indeed! Thanks for a new-to-me use of an old word.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

"Endemic" is a nice word, and useful, too. But I'm not sure how the two meanings are related.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Apparently, they come from the concept of "native to" a population. Sort of. Something in that area, anyway.

A disease that is endemic to a population lives there always. A plant that is endemic to a location comes from there originally.

They're not THAT closely related, I guess. But I can sort of sense a kind of conceptual similarity.

They're not as far apart as all the meanings of "normal", anyway.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I think it'd be hard to match 'normal'. And 'endemic' has the advantage that it's only used in a fairly technical context. But I agree, there is some vague sense of relationship back there ;-).