spalting
n.— «Wood left on the ground for several months, he said, will undergo “a startling transformation and develop a spidery network of black lines.” This process, called spalting, “is due to special fungi that live in the ground.”» —“Artists work in oil and wood” by Rebecca Bailey in Carrboro Herald-Sun (Durham, N.C.) Sept. 29, 2005. (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...