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Word: underflea (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
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...vaudevillian; the flea as athlete (one "can jump about 150 times its own length along, and about 80 times its length up"); the flea as spreader of plague and, in the case of the male, even as sexual tyrant. In mating, says Lehane, a man obviously sympathetic to the underflea, "he grasps her abdomen with his antennae, and sensuously brushes her parts with a wispy membrane. Then violence comes. Copulation lasts about three hours, sometimes as long as nine. ... So sharp and indelicate are the hooks and spines of his organs that the female may in all likelihood have suffered...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Six-Legged Hero | 10/10/1969 | See Source »

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