The lexicography of animals is rich and fascinating. I have written elsewhere (see ‘Collective Nouns’) about the various collective expressions used with reference to groups of animals (a murder of crows, a skein of geese, etc.). These words are more or less well known, and have a surprisingly long history. They are properly referred to as terms of venery. Despite its appearance, venery has nothing to do with the goddess of love. It comes from the Latin venari: to hunt.
Because venery is the practice or sport of hunting, it is no surprise that venison was (originally) any animal normally hunted for meat, or the meat of any animal so caught. So Thoreau in 1884 referred to a hare as a venison; and in 1852 a haunch of kangaroo meat was described as venison without any sense of irony.
Hunting is now considered a sport by those who practise it, and deer are much prized by hunters. Hunters express their admiration for the deer by trying to kill it, so most venison nowadays is deer, and the word has narrowed its meaning accordingly.
The young of many species of animals have names which are radically different from the predictable diminutive. Ogden Nash famously wrote:
Whales have calves,
Cats have kittens,
Bears have cubs,
Bats have bittens,
Swans have cygnets,
Seals have puppies,
But guppies just have little guppies.
The only surprise in his list is bitten, which is made up. The list could be supplemented with heifer, poddy, fawn, foal, and joey. But how many people would immediately remember that a leveret is a young hare; or that a baby hog is a grice (if still sucking) or a shoat (if weaned)? Pup is familiar as referring to young dogs and seals, but equally it refers to a young rat or a baby dragon.
While cygnet and gosling and squab are familiar enough, much less so are eyas (young hawk) and poult (young turkey or domestic chicken). Stranger still are some of the words for young fish of various breeds: young cod are codling or sprag or scrod; baby eels are elver; young salmon can also be sprag, but in addition they are (in chronological sequence) parr, then smolt then grisle and, at all relevant times, alevin. To complete the picture, the spawn of oysters and other bivalves is called spat, but this can also be used in reference to bees’ eggs — doubtless a frequent source of confusion.
Everyone knows what bovine, feline, and canine mean. Less familiar are the adjectives associated with some other animals: dasypodid (pertaining to armadillos); vespertilian (bats); vituline (calves); pithecoid and simian (monkeys); and pongid (gorillas and orang-utans).
The albatross holds an honoured place in the folklore of the sea. It produced grief and guilt for the sailor who shot one, and lived to tell the tale to the wedding guests in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
And the good south wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariners’ hollo!
And I had done an hellish thing,
And it would work ’em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was written in 1798. Less than 100 years earlier, William Dampier had written of a bird called the algatross; not long before that, sailors called it the alcatras. This was at a time when English sailors rarely saw one. They had the word from Dutch and Portuguese sailors who, as it happens, were talking about a different bird altogether.
The albatross is a petrel, a member of the order Diomedea, which is seen in the southern oceans, and so was beyond the range of most English sailors before the seventeenth century. The alcatras is what we now know as the pelican (genus Pelecanus). The pelican’s original Portuguese name — al-catras — is the scoop or bucket (catras) on a water-wheel. It comes originally from the Arab water-lifting device al quadus. The Arabs named the pelican by a related metaphor — al sagga: the water-carrier.
The notorious US prison in San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz, was named after the island on which it stands. A Spanish lieutenant, Juan Manuel de Ayala, explored it in 1755, and named it Isla de los Alcatraces, after the large pelican population there.
Thomas Hobbes popularised Leviathan in his book of the same name, published in 1651. In chapter 28 he wrote:
Hitherto I have set forth the nature of man, whose pride and other passions have compelled him to submit himself to government; together with the great power of his governor, whom I compared to LEVIATHAN, taking that comparison out of the two last verses of the one-and-fortieth of Job; where God, having set forth the great power of Leviathan, calleth him king of the proud. ‘There is nothing,’ saith he, ‘on earth to be compared with him. He is made so as not to be afraid.’
There is great conjecture about what this beast was, on which Hobbes’ metaphor was built. The Leviathan is mentioned four times in the King James version of the Bible. The references in Job 41:1, in Psalms 74:14, and in Psalms 104:26 are consistent with Leviathan being a whale.
All references to Leviathan give the sense that it was a huge beast. The reference in Psalms 104 suggests a whale. Milton, in Paradise Lost (book VII, line 412), calls it the ‘hugest of living creatures’ — which the whale is. Herman Melville, at the start of Moby Dick, takes pains to claim the credit for whales as the Leviathan, but his agenda was clear. Anatole France was equally confident. In Penguin Island (1908), he says:
And Leviathan passed by hurling a column of water up to the clouds.
However, in Isaiah 27:1 the following appears:
In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that [is] in the sea.
Johnson acknowledged the uncertainty, and defined Leviathan as:
A water animal mentioned in the book of Job. By some imagined the crocodile, but in poetry generally taken for the whale.
Only a poet could confuse the whale with a serpent, or with a reptile of any sort. The passage from Isaiah cannot be referring to a whale: the reference to ‘a crooked serpent’ and ‘the dragon … in the sea’ suggests a crocodile, or else a wholly mythical creature.
The possibility that Leviathan is a creature of the imagination gains support from Babylonian literature, which records a battle between the god Marduk and the multi-headed serpent-dragon Tiamat. This story prefigures St George and the dragon. A parallel story in Canaanite writing has Baal fighting Leviathan at Ugarit in Northern Syria: a story more consistent with Leviathan being a huge crocodile, or a dragon.
A creature which is, by definition, imaginary is the chimera. Its name comes from the Greek for he-goat. It is a fire-breathing monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. Other accounts rearrange the body parts, which is both possible and painless in imaginary beasts. Chimera now is used almost exclusively to refer to a ‘wild fancy or unfounded conception’.
Since Hobbes dressed Leviathan in the raiment of government, and Freud lured dragons to the analyst’s couch, such beasts have faded from popular imagination. They are all chimeras now.
The platypus should be chimerical: its oddities are nicely captured by Ogden Nash:
I like the duck-billed platypus
Because it is anomalous
I like the way it raises its family —
Partly birdly, partly mammaly
I like its independent attitude:
Let no-one call it a duck-billed platitude.