You remember Bees – Part 1, right? The waggle dance they do to show other bees where the flowers are? If not, go back there and click on those links, which explain everything.
I’ve just looked through LWON’s archives and we apparently are preoccupied with bees. Them and corvids.
Meanwhile, AG poses another little mystery, as he is wont to do. This one appears in the little mouseover text: “but Otto is a woman’s name.” No, it isn’t. I haven’t one clue what he’s talking about. Unless he’s referring to the son of Karl von Frisch (discoverer of the waggle dance) whose name is/was Otto and who writes/wrote books on the care of pets. Which reminds me of an entirely different Otto Frisch, a physicist who in 1938 sat down on a log with his aunt, Lise Meitner, and figured out nuclear fission, in fact, named it, and later went to Los Alamos to help develop fission’s most immediate application, the atomic bomb.
Nope, none of this explains Otto being a woman’s name. What perfectly obvious reference to modern culture am I missing this time? HELP!
How about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Ottoline_Morrell
She’d probably have been called Otto for short, wouldn’t she? And she buzzed around quite a bit, not to mention sending out lots of waggling signals, by all accounts.
Sorry, that’s my best shot.
Dear Tim, I think you’re right about the waggling but wrong about the nickname. Bloomsbury never seemed to call her anything but Ottoline. I’ve made a minor study of these things.
billy “the bee” elliot
My favorite movie in the universe. I LOVE that movie.
I wonder if AB is taking an obscure jab at this web site.
http://www.gpeters.com/names/baby-names.php?name=Otto
That site reviews name usage on the internet and determines by context whether it is more likely to be a woman’s or a man’s name. They state “Based on popular usage, it is 1.472 times more common for Otto to be a girl’s name.” I suspect a flaw in their algorithm. Maybe AB does too?
I saw that too, Bruz. I suspected a flaw in their English, but you’re more likely right. We’ll never know because AG — AG, not AB — never tells. Who’s AB?