Word: fungused
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Modern specialists in plant diseases would recognize these ominous signs as symptoms of Phytophthora infestans, a species of fungus with rapid germinating properties and extremely virulent effects. To the half-savage, wholly uneducated peasantry, it was known simply as "the Blight," and regarded as a hellish, heaven-sent scourge. Holy-water and incantation were the only remedies invoked against it. Its onset marked the beginning of perhaps the most bitter famine in post-medieval European history...
Size of a grasshopper invasion depends on two factors: i) the number of eggs laid the previous year; 2) the wetness or dryness of the weather. Moderate rain during the spring months keeps down grasshoppers because in moist weather a parasitic fungus flourishes which preys on the larvae. Scientists estimate the number of eggs by digging up the ground, counting the eggs in small sample areas. After they brought in a heavy egg count last spring, followed by continued dry weather, they predicted the worst...
People grow bald because follicles from which hair grows die or become stunted. A dead follicle can never be revived. A stunted one may be. Rarely does a scalp get so fouled with germs or fungus that follicles die and hair falls out. Despite hair tonic advertisements, dandruff, per se, does not cause baldness...
...dandruff. But no bacteriologist before Drs. Moore & Kile had been able to cultivate it for more than two or three generations. Trouble was that in the beginning most bacteriologists thought that Pityrosporum ovalis could be cultured like diphtheria or scarlet fever bacteria. Actually the germ of dandruff is a fungus like yeast and needs special soil for growth. Drs. Moore & Kile raised it on wort agar...
...very bridal night finds more alluring divertissement than his wife," in the words of his councillor; his wife quite wisely lives at the other end of the kingdom. When an American movie star arrives on the scene just as the king is having the fungus on his chin shorn by the court barber, the king discovers the star to be his double, and goes off to Paris, leaving the actor on his throne. The new king popularizes the government by radio broadcasts of his crooning, and incidentally brings the wife back to the fold. I don't remember just...