Sunny Buttercup And Sardonic Laughter

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

When you hear the word "buttercup", one recalls a Soviet song performed by a wonderful singer Olga Voronets, in which girls are not advised to love "beautiful", because their love is "fickle", and therefore even "buttercups" wither from empathy. Such a sensitive image of "buttercups" is associated with very delicate flowers that can take on a part of human pain and feelings. But are the plants, which received the name "Buttercups" from botanists, so tender and receptive?

The genus of plants is numerous, which received the Latin name "Ranunculus", which in translation into Russian sounds like "Frog". Plants of the genus received this name not for their external resemblance to green frogs, but for their predilection to settle closer to water bodies, or even directly in swamp slurry, as tailless amphibians do.

In Russia, a field herb with yellow flowers, the juice of which was poisonous, that is, "fierce" for livestock, was called "Buttercup". The suffix and ending added to the word "fierce" seemed to soften the "poisonous disposition" of the plant, paying a certain tribute to the external picturesqueness of the plant. Since the poems were composed by people, as a rule, far from the problems of animal husbandry, Buttercups slowly turned into a symbol of "tenderness" and "sensitivity". And for the townspeople who were glad to any living flower, Buttercups were a real creative inspiration. For example, Natalia Krandievskaya-Tolstaya (1888-21-01 - 1963-17-09) wrote:

Along the avenue - along the dry groove

Flowers neither to the village nor to the city.

Next to the virgin grass

Lights of night blindness.

"Chicken blindness" has long been called a variety of buttercups in Russia, which has a Latin name - "Ranunculus acris". The specific Latin epithet "acris" means in Russian - "sharp", "caustic". Therefore, the Russian name sounds like "Buttercup caustic".

"Night blindness" is well known to Soviet schoolchildren. She grew everywhere, and therefore was one of the readily available applicants for the manufacture of a summer herbarium for botany. The popular name of the plant was somewhat alarming and frightening, but I do not remember any "criminal" cases from communicating with a caustic plant. As for the spectacular carved leaves and bright yellow shiny flower petals of the plant, they remained in the memory for a lifetime.

Traditional healers use the caustic sap of the plant to treat a number of human ailments, and gardeners have developed the terry form of Caustic Buttercup and successfully decorate their flower beds with bright yellow large five-petal flowers.

There is one representative of the Buttercup genus, which should really be feared. This is "Ranunculus sceleratus". A Google translator into the Latin specific epithet “sceleratus” gave me the Russian word “hooligan”. Apparently, this is some kind of modern interpretation of the Latin word. In the literature, the plant is called simpler and more understandable - "Poisonous buttercup", emphasizing its dangerous toxicity not only for cattle and sheep, but also for humans.

Its petiole leaves are not devoid of elegance and attractiveness, but the flowers are inferior in size to the flowers of other types of Buttercups, although they have the traditional number (five) of golden-yellow petals.

For his place of residence, Poisonous Buttercup chooses muddy and muddy places, in which from time immemorial various evil spirits were found, but it can also be found on the banks of various reservoirs, as well as on wet slopes of ditches.

Toxic substances of Poisonous Buttercup, getting into the human body, cause involuntary muscle convulsions, giving the impression that a person is laughing at the moment of his death. The ancient Greeks called such laughter "sardonic laughter". Since those legendary times, "sardonic laughter" has been called the laughter of sacrifice, renunciation, loss. Today, the use of this expression has expanded somewhat, absorbing laughter, malevolent or cruel.

These are not very funny facts associated with some plant species of the Buttercups genus. The listed species cannot be called gentle and sensitive to the grief of others, although they cause laughter in their victims.

Plants of the genus Buttercups prefer to live in the temperate lands of the Northern Hemisphere. However, I met such a handsome man on the Thai island of Phangan:

Obviously some kind of Buttercup, what do you think?

In justification of Buttercups, we can say that, in principle, the word "Buttercups" can be called numerous plants, united by botanists in the Buttercup family. Among them we will meet the charming Bather; multicolor Aquilegia (or Watershed); spectacular Adonis and picturesque Anemone; Clematis, which is gaining more and more popularity among gardeners; and many other plants.