Stanley wrote: ↑09 Feb 2022, 04:31
Early language can be quite confusing. I always think of the child who asked her mother why people were imprisoned for laughing. She had seen a news report of a man being gaoled for man's laughter......
I hope I haven't already posted this story. It's another example of word confusion...
Mosses, liverworts and seaweeds were thought in the past to have `hidden reproductive parts' and therefore referred to as cryps, short for cryptogams (hidden gametes). A scientist called Tansley at the London Natural History Museum in the 1930s was a famous cryp who had published lots of papers on his subject - seaweeds. When the war started he was called up by the Min of Defence and found himself in a strange place and unsure what he was meant to being studying to help the war effort. There was no seaweed in sight. In fact he was at Bletchley Park, the Ministry not knowing the difference between a cryptogamist and a cryptogramist.
He settled in among the mathematicians etc, doing his best to try and solve some of the puzzles but not bery successfully. Then one day someone brought in an Enigma code book captured from a German U-boat. Unfortunately it was soaked with seawater and they didn't know how to safely preserve it. Tansley came to the rescue and showed them the method he used to preserve seaweed specimens and it worked for the code book pages too. So the seaweed man helped save Britain in WW2!