Wiki: Escargot IPA: [ɛs.kaʁ.ɡɔ] is the French word for snail. It is related to Occitan escaragol and Catalan cargol, which in turn may derive from a pre-Roman word karakauseli.
According to Siganus Sutor, in Mauritius snails are called courtpas in Creole, literally “do-not-run”. In Norway, both slugs and snails are called snailer. Not all snails can be eaten, the eating kind is usually Helix pomatia although, as Sig said, mostly you’re just tasting garlic butter. You’d be better off with bread and garlic butter. Here it is:
There are lots of escargots in our garden in the summer. I mean escargots: not just any old snails, but the ones that get eaten by Frenchpersons. Some years ago, a local man saw a business opportunity and started an escargot hatchery. He was going to supply the French restaurants in Oslo and turn Norway into the escargot-eating capital of Scandinavia, but his plan wasn’t properly thought through, and after a couple of years he went belly up. At that point, apparently, he dumped his — whatever — flock of snails out on the ground and let them run away. In subsequent years they bred very successfully, and now they are all over the place. They are wonderful, I love them. It is a complete lie that they eat up your garden, they don’t significantly touch it.
A Bad Guide 
I am proud to announce that you can eat British common-or-garden snails. We did so repeatedly one summer and weren’t ill once. (You keep them in a bucket with a few lettuce leaves and a puddle of water for a week, changing their water every day.) As you say, they taste of butter and garlic but at least the snails are low food-miles protein.
What an enterprising couple you are, Dearie. I couldn’t bring myself to eat our snails, I like them too much, but I applaud your spirit. Have you done more experimental cookery or garden projects like that?
Do snails in other countries too tend to climb up walls when rain is coming? This morning there were several of these creatures creeping up and up (and up) and, even though it wasn’t raining at that time, it rained a lot afterwards and for the whole day. In fact there is a tropical depression further north, near Madagascar, and it is going to get closer in the coming days — which means more rain. That’s what a human being can see while looking for instance at the website of Meteo-France in Reunion, but I have always wondered how snails did. Do you need to be some kind of godly mixture of Hermes and Aphrodite to be able, on your own, to forecast the rain to come?
We are about to try nettle and bishopweed soup.
I wasn’t sure what Bishopsweed was, but I found this:
So I’d call it ground elder, and my wife would call it skvallerkål… I used to put the young leaves in salads until I started to feel like it was taking over the garden. It didn’t take over, though. It seems possible to keep it within an acceptably small area thanks to the goats, so I might feel better about the taste again soon.
My neighbours made nettle soup last year and loved it. I’m seriously thinking about it.
I wouldn’t know where to check the credentials of the following claim before venturing it, so I’ll let you do that later. Here it is: the snail species that damage gardens are not the edible ones. Around Cologne in the spring, particularly after rains, these enormous, ghastly. naked (shell-less) Jabba-the-Hutt snails (Gartenschnecken) are in every garden, eating everything in sight.
They appear to be contrite about it – post prandium, of course – because they arrange to be on sidewalks where you can step on them “accidentally”. I wonder about this contrition, though, because in being squished they generate such an amount of stinking slime that you can easily slip and break your neck.
I thought you might need to know this.
Are they reddish-brown?
There is a kind of slug that has supposedly advanced on northern Europe from the Iberian peninsula (I say supposedly, because I wonder: how long would that take a slug dynasty?). Anyway, this brownish slug and its ancestors have been crawling up the hill to our house for years, and I mostly just pick them up and turn them round and send them back the way they came. They finally got all the way to our garden last year. To hear people talk about it you’d think the slugs were from al qaida, no one would be safe from now on, etc. No damage was done to our patch, as far as I could see. Our neighbours took up slug hunting; they were both out at dusk every evening last summer with flashlights and shotguns, but they may have seen it as more of a sport. A chemical snail killer is sold at the garden centres; I think much of this badmouthing of snails and slugs may be the manufacturers’ propaganda.
In Norway, they’re probably too sluggish to do much. Maybe the name is based on their primal behavior, and indicates Norwegian origin. So only on their marauding march south do they show bad manners, and true colors. Which are, indeed, reddish-brown.
That’s right, Norwegians are all lying around in the snow taking siestas and acting neutral. They’re a bad influence on slugs.
A friend of mine tried raising snails and said that a pack of snails makes very audible munching sounds constantly.
‘A pack’ sounds like attack snails. I think it’s ‘a flock’, John. I make audible munching sounds, myself. It’s not grounds for being bumped off, as far as I know.
“an escargatoire of snails”
source:
http://bancheese.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/a-gaggle-of-geese/
I have no idea how to pronounce this.
Snails actually do quite a bit of damage to my hostas. All the leaves get tiny holes all over them. My mother uses a product called bug-getta and her hosta leaves are pristine.
There are some folk remedies involving beer but they don’t work. I think hostas must be like chocolate for snails.
I can see why snails would eat hostas, it’s because both thrive in the damp. I’m not a big fan, they remind me of north-facing damp places, but I’m going to give them another chance this year. I know some of them are very lush, like water lilies.
People who kill slugs ought not to use salt, I think it’s very cruel.
I could have sworn I replied to this. Do I have to press ‘save’, or something?
What I said was that site you linked to says that some of their names are ‘fanciful’. They have a ‘hurtle’ of sheep, instead of a flock. So I’m sticking with a flock or herd for herbivores, like snails. A herd of snails?
,they remind me of north-facing damp places
I suppose you mean south-facing, don’t you? Because in my own experience that’s the damp side of places, where indeed you find most snails.
Now I have a BIG question, a question that I already asked on a (French) language blog. There was no answer. It’s to do with the word meridional. Here’s what the AHD has to say about it:
So, more or less, meridional is “in the direction of the sun at midday” (which means that the sun is above your local meridian). In normal places this would mean that the sun is right to your south. Now what about abnormal places where the midday sun and mad dogs and Englishmen are in the north? In such countries, should the ‘inhabitants of northern region’ be called meridionals?
North facing means something else here, which is shade. Hostas are one of the few things that will grow in the shade–under trees or the north side of the buildings. I suppose in the antipodes it’s the south side. But the slugs will leave stuff like euonymous and daylily and even impatients alone. They always go for the hosta.
Salt will kill snails? This is a setup for a joke, isn’t it.
Sig, you’re posting a language question here?
According to the link, under ‘meridian’ it’s got:
5. Archaic a. The highest point in the sky reached by the sun or another celestial body; a zenith. b. Noon.
So, if that was what they meant you’re right. They’re being sexist about the southern peoples and this requires a word, perhaps ‘meridianist’. It’s too bad dictionaries are still so meridianist in their definitions. As you imply with your coinage of the word, the world is still run by a bunch of thoughtless meridionals.
Stuart is very conscious of meridianism in New Zealand. He doesn’t like globes that put him on the bottom. I may have to do a post on this…
Slugs. Sadly, no.
All questions are welcome, from north or south. There are no meridianals at this blog.
To illustrate how much we can have one-sided views without even realising it, Richard Dawkins once mentioned a science fiction book (or maybe a movie) in which a space traveller was saying, with a good deal of nostalgia: “It must be spring on Earth now…”
There are some French people here who would tell you what they’ll do or what happened “cet été”, which for them always means the months of July and August, i.e. the winter months.
Meridian
5. Archaic a. The highest point in the sky reached by the sun or another celestial body
That’s not archaic at all. (At least not in French.) When you get your sextant out of the box around noon (local time) and you measure several hauteurs* while the sun is still rising above the horizon, you finally get the maximum height**. This is a very simple way of getting your latitude: you just need to add or subtract a few angles, among which the sun’s declination on that day. (For the longitude it quite something else.) Doing this operation is called “prendre la méridienne” (take, i.e. measure, the meridian).
* sorry, I’m not sure what the English word is (basically it’s the angle between the sun and the horizon)
** maybe the English word is just ‘height’ after all
(For the longitude it’s quite something else.)
There was a bestselling book called ‘Longitude‘, by Dava Sobel — which I now see was also made into a film, so everyone should understand the concept now, even me. There was a man called Harrison, who in the eighteenth century made a clock that kept proper time, and thereby solved the problem of how to navigate in an E-W direction. It became possible to tell how many degrees you were from the Greenwich meridian by how much earlier or later than Greenwich the sun where you were reached its zenith.
I’m not sure what the English word is (basically it’s the angle between the sun and the horizon)
I tried googling, but I can’t find it. We need help from the Hatty people. I’ve got my grandfather’s sextant somewhere, but I can’t find it.
Actually, I suppose the word should really be hemispheric, rather than meridianal. People who favour others on the same meridian as themselves are just… weird.
I thought slug-bait and snail-bait was the same thing. I certainly have both creatures crawling in the same flowerpots, and my mother’s bug-getta attracts them both. I thought the one with the shell was just more mature.
But salt? Obviously that isn’t good for plants so you can’t just put it on the ground.
One year I tried to flush them down the toilet in order to try to send them back to their native environment, but that was a big mistake. They stick to things where you can’t see them. I was afraid to use the toilet for several days afterwards.
>you measure several hauteurs* while the sun is still rising above the horizon
I’ve known people whose hauteur couldn’t be measured in this way, since it never reached a maximum.
For what it’s worth (not much), I’d say hauteur is a French noun also used in English, but haughty is an English adjective not used in French.
I’m not going to help you kill snails, I like them a lot more than I do hostas.
Oh, Kron I’ve never killed a snail. I can’t bring myself to step on them. And I’m sure not going to put them in the toilet this year. But there’s so many, and they collect in my flowerpots, and when I water there are slugs all over.
Maybe I just won’t put flowerpots out this year–that guy upstairs woke me up with his tuba again this morning. Every time I think I won’t have to move, something like that happens again. My landlord is bribing me to stay with an offer to rent the only garage on the property at a discount.
I don’t think snails like the tuba. It echoes in their shell.
Grumbly Stu: I’ve known people whose hauteur couldn’t be measured in this way, since it never reached a maximum.
Did the protocol require that you called them something like “Your Highness”?
It became possible to tell how many degrees you were from the Greenwich meridian by how much earlier or later than Greenwich the sun where you were reached its zenith.
That would give you a very imprecise measurement of your longitude since the tangent to the graph drawn when you plot the sun elevation* vs time is horizontal at maximum height, which means that there would be much uncertainty about the exact time the maximum occurred. A much better way to do it would to draw two “droites de hauteur” (“position circle” in English?) taken at different times, or at the same time for different celestial bodies, and see where they intersect each other.
* Maybe the English word for hauteur would be “elevation”?
What I mentioned above is reasonably well described on this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercept_method
From this page it could also be inferred that in astronomical navigation la hauteur of a body is its altitude: “Using a sextant, an altitude is obtained of the sun, the moon, a star or a planet.”
There’s also a funny expression that I discovered there: dead reckoning. I wonder what the Vikings had as ‘dead reckoning’. They must have had something since they were able to go to Greenland and back, no?
This is all very enlightening for me, Sig. I’m sorry I only just saw it.
There are some good names here: ‘dead reckoning’ — ‘Yup, I reckon he’s dead’ — but also ‘the Rude Star Finder’. What’s a rude star?
Maybe a rude star has something to do with people from the “the star and key” (of the I.O.). Martians can be quite rude at times. Sometimes they can’t even write proper English.
Be it taken from a star or a wandering star (i.e. a planet), a “position estimée” is nowhere near a “dead reckoning”. English expressions can have their own spirit (génie), which is too often lost in translation.
I was born under a wandering star.
I was born under a wandering star.
Siganus “Malotru” Sutor, still painting his wagon
Stella clavisque is quite suspicious; because ‘clavUs‘, I see from my Latin dictionary is ‘stripe’. So Mauritius is only one letter away from being the star and stripe of the Indian Ocean — which I had thought was Diego Garcia. Ha, now I see D.G. used to be a dependency of Mauritius! The plot thickens.
The Rude Star Finder is the invention of a Captain Rude . Here is a picture.
I found the astronomical stuff at Sig’s links a bit hard to follow, for reasons unclear to me, since I am 1/2 of a mathematician – the better half, I like to think, since I didn’t become a nerd, but merely a pedant. Maybe I’m just not used to thinking about that kind of practical mathematics.
The idea occurred to me that understanding this elevation/azimuth business should be easier in spherical coordinates, but holy cow! Just scroll down this page. The upside is that I found free MIT math course videos.
Ok that makes sense. There was a man called Francois Rude, who I think did the sculptures on the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris.
Grumbly, I’m glad to see you, I guess you’ve been working. I agree, it’s kind of hard to follow. The drawings aren’t adequately labeled, I felt.
I scrolled the page and wondered what a ‘Jacobean’ is, but I don’t know enough calculus to find out.
Those MIT videos are fantastic! Just what I need. Thanks. They even have high school ones my daughter could watch.
Ha, now I see D.G. used to be…
Don’t rub it in please.
Grumbly Stu, I can try to put it as simply as possible in my own words. I hope it won’t sound too confusing or too boring.
First you have to start with an estimated position, which you have to assess from your previous known position and the dead reckoning mentioned above (“estime” in French — I don’t know what it is in German).
At a very precise moment, you measure the angle between the Sun (or another body) and the horizon — let’s call this angle α. Given the time you do this, you can check in an almanac where the Sun is in the sky, i.e. above which point on the Earth it is located at this very moment. Given this information, you can calculate what angle you should have measured if you really were at your estimated position, and what the Sun’s direction should be (say for instance southeast, i.e. 135º, if you did your measurement around 9 a.m. local time in the Northern hemisphere).
Unless you are the master of all “dead reckoners”, there will be a difference between 1) the angle you would have measured if you were exactly at your estimated position and 2) the angle α you actually measured. This difference in angles will tell you how far you are from your estimated position, in the direction of the Sun. One minute of angle being one nautical mile, you now know that you are, say, 30 miles further away from the Sun’s position on the Earth if your measured angle α is 30’ (half a degree) less than the calculated angle.
On your map, you then draw a line that passes on your estimated position and that is parallel to the direction of the Sun (say compass bearing 135º in our example). You count 30 miles backward along that line and on the point you reach you draw a second line perpendicular to the first one. This second line is our “droite de hauteur”, i.e. a “line of position”. It is all the points on the Earth that see the Sun at an altitude α at the time of measurement. (Actually it is not a line but a circle. But the circle is so big — thousands of miles in radius — that in the relatively small area we are interested in it is practically a straight line.) We know we must be somewhere on that line, but we don’t know where exactly. To be able to know where we are on this line we must get another “line of position” that will intersect the first one. To do this, you have a choice: either you wait for the Sun to move in the sky so that its direction (its azimuth*) changes or there is another body you can shoot (Moon, planet or star). To use the second possibility you need to wait for dawn or for dusk, though on a few occasions I have been able to see Venus with the naked eye during the day.
* with or without -h in English?
Yes, Azimuth is with an H in English. That’s about as far as I can contribute to this, although I’m glad to be learning.
That’s about as far as I can contribute to this
Hmmm… Being abstruse can be a goal for some people sometimes, but that’s not what I’m looking for here. Let’s meet somewhere and I’ll try to draw a few sketches to shed some (sun)light on the matter. Would 20º09’49″S by 57º30’35″E be alright with you?
By the way, I don’t have a Rude Star Finder — I’ve never found any star, not even a planet. I just have a carton thingy that is set for a certain latitude. I don’t know how to post an image in a comment. Maybe commenters are not allowed to do this, and with good reasons. Can you imagine the junk that would be flourishing on blogs, and how embarrassing it could be to see a photo of yourself picking your nose, or doing something worse, photo that would have been uploaded by your fed-up wife, a wife fed up with a husband spending so much time blogging?
(But I have my connections. I know the Goat Master, hey.)
I’ve never found a way to put an image in the comments, even if you’re a user with administrative functions. The best you can do, not be be a broken record or anything, is to have your own blog, upload the picture to your blog, then post the URL. Something like this:
If you’re good at delegating, you could always get your wife to start a blog, then prevail upon her to upload something for you.
During the Viking Age there were two devices for navigation in existence that I have heard of. One is a circular device with some sort of notches. The other is a stone–“sunstone” (?)–for finding the location of the sun when it is overcast.
To insert images in a post, use this pattern:
<img src="" />
with the image URL in the quotes. For instance,
<img
src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Qi2bV1oHNrU/Sar3TOxoULI/AAAAAAAAABc/w6LbZEsa0wM/S719/luhmann+croco+boy.jpg" />
It may be that not every posting editor (the HTML server software to which the entry field contents are send, and that converts them into a post on the site) will accept this “img” HTML tag (as it is called). At LH, the post editor has refused to publish certain tags that I wanted to use – I forget which ones they were.
Subject to this constraint, you can reuse tags behind certain effects that you may encounter on a page of a website. Just inspect the HTML source code of the page. To get this, use the right-click menu of the mouse pointer as it is positioned over the page, then [in Firefox] select the menu item “show source text”, or whatever it’s called in English). Scan down the page, orienting yourself say by text that, on the browser page, appears near the effect you want to reproduce, and look at the HTML stuff nearby in the source text.
That’s how I discovered how to insert images, by inspecting JJ’s source pages with pictures of Mauritius.
Siganus, thanks for the lucid explanation in everyday terms! I understood it immediately. It must just be the technical terms that seemed to obscure things.
But now that these things are no longer obscure to me, I can easily learn the technical terms. That’s how it is with technical terms. They are not there to expand knowledge, but to contract it, i.e. you have to have the knowledge first. Technical terms are abbreviations intended to spare you the detailed discourse that would otherwise be necessary to talk about detailed phenomena. Sometimes a technical term is introduced to describe something completely new and unknown up to that time – but such a term then has something metaphorical or otherwise suggestive about it, relating it to something already known. Example: “quantum” in “quantum mechanics”. A “really new” word, like xutisc, would be useless, because unrelatable (you can’t use it to relate knowledge, because it’s not related to anything).
So I see that “droite de hauteur” means (in my diffident French) “droite qui passe à travers les locations en lesquelles l’hauteur mesurée du soleil au-dessus de l’horizon, à un instant donné, est la même pour toutes”. The English term “line of position” contracts a description which uses equivalent aspects: “the line through positions on the earth from which, at a given instant of time, the apparent height of the sun above the horizon is the same”.
That is, to say that the terms “droite de hauteur” and “line of position” are equivalent is to say that I can expand them to obtain slightly different descriptions of the same set of circumstances. Height of sun and location of observer are related to each other. “Height” means “apparent height” means “measured angle above the horizon”. You’re not actually measuring the height of something in terms of kilometers.
I can’t get it to accept it, Stu. All the code, with the URL and all, just disappears when I click the ‘comment update’ button.
<img
src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Qi2bV1oHNrU/Sar3TOxoULI/AAAAAAAAABc/w6LbZEsa0wM/S719/luhmann+croco+boy.jpg" />
I just tried it out in another form, but no luck. The posting editor (as I’ve been calling it) at the server is refusing the tag, as I said may happen.
I just inserted a snail image from this page into my site, by copying the tag from the source of this page.
What I don’t understand is that I got this HTML tag
<img class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-224″ title=”helix_pomatia” src=”https://abadguide.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/helix_pomatia.jpg?w=400&h=289″ alt=”helix_pomatia” width=”400″ height=”289″ />
from your site. Maybe it has to have all the additional attributes, like width and heigth. It it succeeds, the image should now appear (unfortunately there is no preview button for posts here):
No luck, the posting editor is not up to it. You must have some special mechanism for inserting images into your blogs.
OK!
I’ve avoided the whole issue by adding a page.
If you look at the top of the blog, next to ‘FRONT PAGE’ and ‘CROWN’, I’ve added ‘A BAD GUIDE TO NAVIGATION’. I’ve pasted the whole series of comments about navigation as well as Sig’s carte. You all can continue making comments below that.