Word: weede
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Agriculture and Carl B. Huffaker of the University of California pored over old records and learned that the plant had not been found in the U.S. before 1903. Then they traced it to its native habitat in Italy and Spain, were surprised to find that on home grounds the weed did not thrive as it did in the U.S. Searching for an explanation, the biologists discovered that the puncture weed is peculiarly susceptible to a particular European pest called the puncture-vine weevil-a quarter-inch brownish beetle with a snoutlike head. The weevil's life cycle is inextricably...
During the summer adult weevils lay eggs in the seed pods of the puncture weed. In the spring the growing larvae feast on the seeds, killing them. Later the weevils even develop wings for a short time and follow seeds that the plants may have thrown to the wind. If there is a large crop of seeds, the weevils flourish along with their food supply. If there are more weevils than plant seeds, the little bugs simply die off. Thus nature maintains a delicate balance that allows neither the puncture weed nor its weevil to stir up a population explosion...
Occasional Bite. For five years Holloway and Huffaker tempted the weevil with other plants. They found that the worst the weevils would do was to take an occasional bite out of alfalfa or flax if there was no puncture weed around, but they also discovered that the weevil's larvae could only grow in the pods of puncture vines. Convinced that the weevils were safe enough for large-scale experiments, the biologists imported 15 from Italy early this year and turned them loose to feast on a private garden of puncture weed. Now they have a crop of more...
...Other names for the puncture weed: goat-head, Mexican sandburr, ground burr...
...pruning archaisms from their translation: saith and doth are out; thee and thou are not used, except when God is addressed. Lord (in capital letters) will be used in place of Jehovah-a philologically meaningless attempt to render the sacred Hebrew Tetragrammaton YHWH. The translators are also trying to weed out what Driver calls "nonsense" caused by faulty reading of the manuscripts. In Psalm 2, for example, "Tremble before him and kiss his feet in homage" will replace a serious misinterpretation in the King James Version: "Rejoice with trembling. Kiss the son, lest he be angry." Job's picturesque...