A Game of Telephone

One academic friends told me, gleefully, that some new slime molds had been named after Msrs Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. I sent him a pointer to this article:

Cornell News: Slime-mold beetle named for Bush

and noted that they were actually beetles, albeit beetles that live on slime molds.

Next time he saw me, he thanked me, but said that he was disappointed to learn, from reading it, that the naming was to praise these individuals, not slam them. (The scientists named other species, discovered at the same time, after their wives.)

Be interesting, sociologically, to trace how an explicit homage to the President got distorted, by the time it got to him, into something to be passed around as a derogatory remark. Maybe Ward Churchill could have one of his grad students do a scholarly study on it.