antirrhinum

[prettygoodword]

antirrhinum (an-tuh-RAI-nuhm) - n., any of about thirty plants of genus Antirrhinum, the snapdragons, esp. A. majus, common snapdragon, cultivated as ornamentals.



Thanks, WikiMedia!

Roughly thirty species -- given how any cultivated species gets interbred, the exact count is a little fluid. Antirrhinum came to us around 1550 from the Latin name for snapdragons, from Ancient Greek antirrhīnon, snapdragon, from anti- in the unusual sense of resembling (an extension its "equivalent to" sense, a metaphoric extension of it's "against" sense) + rhin-, combining form of rhis, nose -- "looks like a snout." Snapdragon, on the other hand, is from how, when you squeeze the flower's "throat," its "mouth" snaps open supposedly like a dragon's mouth.

(I swear, the number of ways I mistyped "snapdragon," writing this up ... )

---L.

Comments

[full_metal_ox]

Fun Fact: the peculiar fluorescent, slightly greenish firefly yellow of snapdragons (commingled with magenta into orange in your pictured specimen) derives not from carotenoids but from aurones, a subclass of flavonoids.



(I suspect that most of the color range in snapdragons comes from the interaction—including absence—of yellow and magenta pigments, since the range of reds, pinks, yellows, and blends thereof are very much like what you’d get from Hansa Yellow Light, Quinacridone Magenta, and white.)

[prettygoodword]

Huh!

[full_metal_ox]

Further Fun Fact: in the wild among insect pollinators, there seems to be a Coke-versus-Pepsi regional preference divide between magenta snapdragons with yellow mouths and yellow snapdragons with magenta mouths:

https://web.archive.org/web/20171118185607/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/science/snapdragons-colors-genes.html#expand