A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
barnacle
A crustacean that spends its youth swimming freely, then cements itself head-down to rock, hull, or whale for the rest of its life and builds a house of calcareous plates around itself. From inside, it sweeps feathery legs out through the opening and combs food from the water. It is a shrimp lying on its back, kicking, inside a fort.
Etymology
Barnacle geese winter in Britain and Ireland and vanish north each spring, and before anyone understood migration, nobody could find a nest or an egg. Goose barnacles wash ashore on driftwood, black and white, with a long neck-like stalk. The obvious conclusion was drawn: the geese grew from the barnacles, or from the wood itself, hanging by their beaks until ripe. Gerald of Wales wrote it down in his Topographia Hibernica around 1187 and noted that Irish clergy ate the birds during Lent on the grounds that they were not flesh. Which name came first is unclear — the bird and the shellfish have been swapping the word for eight hundred years.
Notes
Pope Innocent III ruled the birds off the Lenten menu in 1215, not by disputing the biology but by observing that they lived and fed like ducks. Frederick II ordered barnacle-covered driftwood brought down from the north, had the shells opened, and found no bird inside any of them, concluding that the geese simply nested somewhere nobody had been. Albertus Magnus settled it by penning a barnacle goose with a domestic one and watching the eggs hatch.