I’m not sure I’m allowed to do this, but anyway here is a picture someone sent in to Dagbladet, an Oslo daily paper. There’s an elk in their garden. Apparently she had a calf with her, and she had plans to eat the hyacinths and find some warmth. I hope the householders let them in, it doesn’t say.
It’s currently about -20 °C, or -5 °F. That’s jolly cold for us who live around Oslo. There’s a cold snap all over Europe; in England it got so cold they had (gasp) snow. The leaders of British industry are taking a tough line; they’re NOT allowing their employees time off work. They say they only want to make snowmen and slide down hills on tea-trays — and their workers aren’t any better.
A Bad Guide 
A reminder: Don’t be misled by the American usage of “elk” as a synonym for “wapiti”. The European elk is the same as the American moose, the grandest of the deer family.
Even though I’ve read about this problem of assigning different words to the same beast, my reaction to the photo was “A moose” (not “Ann Elk).
We used to get them in the schoolyard in Anchorage; but they never – during my residence – made it the couple of blocks further to our yard… I thought it wasn’t your windowsill, though – do you get them at home? Do they bother the goats? Or vice versa?
WKPD: “[American] Elk are almost identical to red deer found in Europe”.
The President of the Glen.
A few years ago a moose/nelk came running down the street where I live, in an old residential area 1 km outside the center in an average Norwegian city. Another time three of them (a mother and two yearling calves, if I’m not mistaken) came all the way into the center. One of them jumped over a retaining wall (of my design, lucky it didn’t break down) and broke its legs. I don’t remember what happened to the last two, except that they died. This happens now and again in most Norwegian cities, especially in the hunting season when panicking animals flee their ancestral homes.
It can’t really compete with what happened to a homeowner near my work. Suddenly an elephant came walking into his garden harvesting apples from his tree.
The elephant in the garden.
When I looked up wapiti all I got was a WW2 Maori fighter pilot, and I can’t see an elk jamming itself into a Spitfire*.
We don’t get meese — we call them elks — coming up to our door here; although they live in the woods they’re very shy, and rightly so. I know they are around, because I’ve seen them very occasionally and also I’ve seen droppings. I can’t imagine them wanting to associate with the goats, but who knows.
When we lived in the middle of Oslo, one night I saw a badger walking up the middle of the road, all the way up the hill of Thereses gate, followed very slowly by a tram.
*I mistakenly looked up wipiti, apparently
Suddenly an elephant came walking into his garden harvesting apples from his tree.
Was he packing for a trip to the Limpopo, or what?
You’re thinking of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees.
WKPD: “[American] Elk are almost identical to red deer found in Europe”.
Last night I wound up indulging in a small binge of editing WKPD for style/clarity/grammar/spelling — silly me — including that very paragraph. I left in the “almost identical to” because I had no reason to doubt it. When you do that sort of thing you are reminded of some of the dangers of this kind of multiple authorship: you can change the sense of a text unwittingly when you rewrite for clarity, because (of course) it may not have been clear to you what the intended sense was.
The President of the Glen.
Chief Executive of the Glen would be a better parallel.
Leading a tram at Bislett? I think that might have been Jan Erik Vold on his way home from Kunstnernes hus (or wherever poets hang around).
Oh, and some say that elephant and elk are related. Etymologically, that is. Eleph would then correspond to elk. The rest is more obcure since there’s no antos. One suggestion I’ve seen is an eleph-antos “elkhorn” used as the generic Greek term for bone or boneware, and then for ivory, before stickimg to the source animal, another is a mangling of eleph indos “Indian elk (or whatever horny animal eleph denoted)”.
you can change the sense of a text unwittingly when you rewrite for clarity
Changing the meaning is one of the problems also with prescriptivism.
I would love for someone to clean up the wikipedia architecture articles, for content as well as for the rest; I’d find it too depressing a job to want to do it myself.
elephant and elk are related
There is a similarity in the animals’ faces. Although I think elk look most of all like horses, the foreshortened head of the one above makes it look a bit like a kangaroo, I thought.
I added a wiki link to Kunstnernes hus, Trond; you hadn’t added anything, but if you want another one I’ll change it (Kunstnernes hus is so very much not an example of what “Functionalism” means; it’s symmetrical, for god’s sake).
oh an elk, i thought it’s a donkey
oh i thought and wrote or, strange
b/c an elk lacks its horns, we used to have deers right outside our apartment block or in the park, then during the transition the braconniers hunted almost all of them for their horns to sell to china, it’s used in the traditional medicine they say, people are so stupid and cruel
http://3.ly/cPaZ
Yes, I also thought it looks a lot like a donkey. You have to remember that it’s about ten times the size of one.
People are so stupid and cruel.
They are. But stupid & cruel is better than smart & cruel. Yeah, it looks a lot like Norway. I love Buddhist monks. Is braconniers often used in English? It sounds more dashing than poachers.
I’ surprised to hear you say the elk are shy, Crown. Hiking in Montana, I was told that elk and moose are far more dangerous to run into than bears or mountain lions. Supposedly they’re not scared of people at all. Maybe a regional difference? Or maybe my guides were full of shit.
Or maybe it was just moose, and I threw the elk in there. It was a long time ago.
I added a wiki link to Kunstnernes hus, Trond; you hadn’t added anything
Well, OK. I suppose it’s better with a non-empty link now that so many non-empty people have joined in.
I know next to nothing about mooses ( over here they’re the same as elk). Since I never see them even though I know they’re around I assume they’re shy, but I could be wrong. They are huge. There are miles and miles of fences along the main roads here, in places of migration, so they don’t total the cars. Grassy bridges have been erected for the elks to cross.
I didn’t know mountain lions were dangerous to people. They have them here too. And bears. There’s supposed to be a former bear-hibernation nest near our house, but I’ve never seen it & I’ve never met anyone who’s seen a bear around here. Maybe Trond has, though.
Oh, and some say that elephant and elk are related. Etymologically, that is. Eleph would then correspond to elk. The rest is more obcure since there’s no antos. One suggestion I’ve seen is an eleph-antos “elkhorn” used as the generic Greek term for bone or boneware, and then for ivory, before stickimg to the source animal, another is a mangling of eleph indos “Indian elk (or whatever horny animal eleph denoted)”.
I don’t think they are etymologically related. Greek elephas means ivory, just like Latin ebur. The suffix -antos is simply a mark of genitive case (quasi ‘the exotic animal belonging to the well-known ivory material’), and is not to be confused with anthos, ‘eruption, horn, flower’. The genitive form was taken on from Greek to Latin as an alternative name of the animal, which is thus both called elephas, -antis and elephantus, -i. Elk, on the other hand, comes from Greek alkê through Latin alces, -is which indicates the same animal.
I didn’t know mountain lions were dangerous to people. They have them here too.
I’m not sure we’re talking about the same animal. What is called “mountain lion” over here (Puma concolor seems to be the current scientific name) has a large number of common names, including “cougar” and “puma”. It’s supposed to be a New World critter, so unless yours have escaped from zoos I don’t know.
Do these lions eat ants, by any chance?
We don’t have those in Britain. Elk ‘n’ Safety, you know.
I sense that there is a pun going over my head here.
AJP: You wouldn’t mean a Westland Wapiti ?
Nah, Ø , it’s Elf ‘n’ Safety that would go over your head.
Oh, Elf ‘n’ Safety! I thought you said Elk ‘n’ Safety. Now I get it.
That reminds me: My son has just started reading Great Expectations in school, and he can’t quite believe that there really is a dialect of British in which people say “indiwidual”.
The problem is that America has no National Elf Service.
My son … can’t quite believe that there really is a dialect of British in which people say “indiwidual”.
Your son is not alone. I grew up in London, and to me that W in Dickens always sounds like Dick van Dyke-type Cockney, from Mary Poppins. He also writes “wery” for “very”:
in Oliver Twist and
said by Sam Weller, in Pickwick Papers (“fi’ pun’ note”, is a brilliant piece of hearing by Dickens). Nobody has substituted that kind of W, as far as I know, since the 19th c. ; certainly not in my lifetime .
There’s (I think) another kind of V & W transposition in Dickens, one that must have come into English through German or Skandinavian or eastern European immigrants’ speech. In this piece, from Scenes: Chapter V: Seven Dials, in Sketches From Boz, the two kinds get mixed up:
That’s perfect Cockney, though a phrase like “Vy don’t you?”, at least to my ear, sounds Jewish-immigrant-influenced, sort of like Fagin’s speech in Oliver Twist. The “wery” or “indiwidual” examples, though, can still today be heard when Norwegians speak English. My wife (whose English is otherwise very good) mixes up this kind of thing all the time.