A Phlegmagogue for the Elaphure
Sunday November 06, 2005; part of: Blather

I've been dithering about what to put in this slot. In a linkier and shorter place I would simply put the two delightful words I found while cheating at the FT crossword yesterday -- elaphure and phlegmagogue. An elaphure is actually a Père David's Deer, so now we have an animal with two beautiful names, though I prefer elaphure. A phlegmagogue is not -- as you might think -- a teacher of snot, but a medicine which expels it. The word has been little used since the 17th century, according to the OED, which has no quotes after 1737, but one lovely cite:

1671 Salmon Syn. Med. iii. li. 570 Electuary of Jallap..is a good Phlegmagogue.

UPDATE: Google Print, however, has four results, for phlegmagogue and twenty pages on elaphure. That's pretty impressive, though none will give you a definition.

Posted by andrewb at November 06, 2005 01:03 PM
Comments

An elaphure is actually a [what?] David's Deer? Likewise, A phlegmagogue is not [what?] as I might think?

Maybe it's just Safari, but even viewing the source doesn't give me much of a clue.

...

But Google does. OK, Pere David, but the page source gives PÃ& uml;re

Still drawing a blank on #2.

Posted by: Jonathan Lundell on November 6, 2005 06:25 PM

Are you looking at the individual entry? It shows up fine on the front page.

Posted by: acb on November 6, 2005 06:32 PM

I think this is fixed now. Cut and paste to blame.

Posted by: acb on November 6, 2005 10:04 PM

Yes, I was, and yes, it's fixed. Thanks.

Posted by: Jonathan Lundell on November 7, 2005 02:17 AM

BTW, I almost always come to an individual entry, since I read via rss. On that subject, the link from entry pages to the front page is pretty obscure. I'd expect the Helmintholog banner to be a live link as well, but no.

Posted by: Jonathan Lundell on November 7, 2005 10:14 PM

I stopped that becasue it looked bad in an earlier design. It's reinstated now and looks fine in Opera 8.5. Complaints to the usual address.

Posted by: acb on November 8, 2005 08:04 AM

It looks fine in Safari (except that the image background is noticeably darker than the rest of the page background).

But Firefox (Mac) is putting a border around it, with a hover of a thick underline.

FWIW, http://coastsider.com does something similar but without the problem. Not sure what the entire difference is, though it does have border=0 in the img.

Posted by: Jonathan Lundell on November 9, 2005 12:44 AM

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