Two things I learned last week:
- That there is a Curculio Institute, headquartered in Mönchengladbach, Germany. The website (www.curci.de) helpfully defines it as “Center for Studies on western Palearctic Curculionoidea”, in other words, European weevils.
- That their newsletter, formerly Weevil News, has been renamed Snudebiller. It was obvious that that must mean ‘weevils’ in some language or other, and that ‘snude’ is cognate with English ‘snout’, but it took Google Translate’s ‘Detect Language’ button to tell me that the word is Danish. Why a Danish title, when the institute is in Germany, the editors are Germans, and the website is in English and German? I don’t know, but I like the sound of ‘snudebiller’ – even better than ‘weevil’ or ‘Rüsselkäfer’ – so perhaps euphony was the key.
