moth

filipendulous

If something is filipendulous, it means it’s hanging by a thread or a filament. It’s most often used to describe things that appear suspended by delicate or slender attachments, and look like they could drop at any moment. Like a spider suspended by a single thread. Or my sanity.

Like many of our words (especially the complicated ones), filipendulous comes from Latin. It’s a combination of the Latin word ‘filum’ meaning ‘thread’, and ‘pendere’ which means ‘to hang’.

You’re most likely to come across the word filipendulous in botany, where it’s used to describe plants with structures on fine stalks or threads. There’s actually a genus of plants called Filipendula containing 12 species of perennial herbaceous plants. That includes meadowsweet and dropwort, and the excellently named queen-of-the-forest (Filipendula occidentalis) and queen-of-the-prairie (Filipendula rubra), both of which are native to North America.

Filipendula species are food plants for the larvae of some Lepidoptera (AKA butterflies and moths) species, including the emperor moth, one of the biggest in the world. The largest emperor moth has a wingspan of between 15 and 20cm (6 to 8 inches). Yeesh. (I’ve literally just finished reading ‘The Travelling Bag’ by Susan Hill which makes this fact particularly freaky. If you know, you know.) These moths live in Europe, but haven’t made it across the Channel to us (YET). Having said that, our largest moth is the privet hawk moth, which can get up to a not-too-shabby 12cm (4.7in) wingspan.

You wouldn’t want either of those flapping round your bedroom light, would you?

bug

I happened to be watching a bit of Countdown the other day (I definitely wasn’t skiving) when this came up in Susie Dent’s origins of words segment. And it was such a good story I had to share it. So, of course you know what a bug is. But in this case the bugs I’m referring to aren’t the insect-y ones, but the defect-y ones – like software or engineering bugs. ‘Bug’ in this sense is probably older than you think (turns out technology has been not working properly for a really long time), and goes all the way back to the 1870s. It probably came from the Middle English word ‘bugge’, meaning a bogeyman or goblin, which is also where we get ‘bugbear’ from (a previous word of the week).

Up until the 1940s, the word ‘bug’ in this context was really only known by by engineers, programmers and the like. That’s until Grace Hopper came along, computer pioneer and all-round amazing human woman. After serving in the American Navy, Hopper joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she worked on the Mark II and Mark III computers (used for ballistic calculations and other very complicated computer-y things). There was an error in the Mark II which operators traced to a moth trapped in a relay – an actual real-live bug in the system. It was logged in the log (obviously) book by one William Burke as ‘First actual case of bug being found’ (you can see the actual moth below, which is now in the Smithsonian Museum). Hopper loved to tell the story, popularising the term so much that we all use it today.