So, I took multiple classes on Moby-Dick as an undergrad & one of the first things you learn is that Ishmael is NOT his name; it’s an allusion to Ishmael from the Book of Genesis (the exiled son of Abraham, of whom it was prophesied, “His hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him”). The narrator imagines himself an outcast, rejected by society & forced to seek his destiny on the high seas. His self-understanding is beautifully transformed during the scene in which he shares a bed with the cannibal harpooner Queequeg, who becomes his bosom friend. As his heart softens, he writes, “I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.” Love has come to redeem him. He is Ishmael no more.
The reason we think dandelions are weeds is because of a 1950s marketing campaign.
Dandelions, native to Europe and Asia, were brought to North America in the 1600s by European colonists who grew them deliberately.
Every part is edible. The leaves are a salad green, the flowers were made into wine, and the roots were roasted as a coffee substitute and used medicinally for liver and kidney conditions for thousands of years. They were a kitchen-garden staple well into the 1800s.
The shift happened after World War II, when 2,4-D (originally developed for chemical warfare research) was approved as a residential herbicide. Companies like Scotts built the modern lawn-care industry around the idea that a perfect green lawn meant zero broadleaf plants.
Dandelions, being bright yellow and resistant to mowing, became a visible enemy, and the campaign worked. By the 1970s, "dandelion-free" was synonymous with "well-kept."
They aren't native, but they aren't doing significant ecological harm either. The herbicides used to kill them, on the other hand, kill bees, contaminate groundwater, and have been linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma in humans.
If you hate dandelions, it's most likely due to a marketing campaign that ran before you were born.
@SamaHoole I'm appreciating this post from the state of Minnesota, US, where, in our household, we children were given that same teaspoon of cod liver oil each and every winter morning. (I'm still taking it.)
“When Friedrich Froebel coined the name ‘kindergarten,’ he meant it literally – ‘a garden of children’ – where each child is nurtured with the same love and care given to a seedling.” —Johann Christoph Arnold
https://t.co/PDwFPISmVA
Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5,000 years.
This from @TuhinChakr is brilliant. That prize winning story from Granta? Turns out it's just a bunch of random whole phrases taken directly from existing text on the internet. Tool allows you to trace those n-grams directly to their source, which is mostly random fanfiction.
https://t.co/Bi03nvSHnx