herp
n.— «Yet another informal grade name, favoured by American zoologists, is “herp.” Herpetology is the study of reptiles (except birds) and amphibians. “Herp” is a rare kind of word: an abbreviation for which there is no long form. A herp is simply the kind of animal studied by a herpetologist, and that is a pretty lame way to define an animal. The only other name that comes close is the biblical “creeping thing.”» —by Richard Dawkins The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution , 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...