This post is about a weird dream I had around midsummer. I realise a dream may not seem an appropriate topic for this type of blog, but in a way it is. You’ll see.
Obviously I don’t remember half of it, except that it was weird. It was a kind of discursive competition between the Chandler character from Friends and an anonymous interlocutor. At one point, they were discussing the deaths from starvation of two groups, each of which was somehow connected to one of them. Please don’t ask what kind of sick competition this was, but I guess you could compare it to Monty Python’s ‘We Were So Poor’ sketch, where the four characters try to outdo one another by making increasingly exaggerated claims about their deprived childhoods.
My dream version of Chandler claimed that the people in his group had died because they had fed the bread they were given to birds (instead of keeping it for themselves). The interlocutor then reminded him that, at some earlier point in the discussion (not recorded in my dream), Chandler had apparently mentioned that his group lived in the desert – not the kind of place where many animals live, let alone birds (at least in my Western mindset). So basically his thesis didn’t stand up.
Chandler replicated that he had actually meant the desert ‘of Australia’, implying that the people had fed ostriches – a species I apparently associate with Australia. The interlocutor protested, saying that this didn’t count because ostriches aren’t birds (probably again in my Western mindset).
At that point, I woke up. What the hell was that all about?! And why Chandler? I haven’t watched an episode of Friends for like 30 years…Then I started ruminating on the word ‘ostrich’. I confess that I couldn’t remember the English word: my mind kept going back to the Italian, struzzo. Maybe I got my wires crossed because of the striking similarity between ‘ostrich’ and ostrica, the Italian word for oyster? Anyway, all this kept me awake for a while, and when I couldn’t resist any longer, I went to check my phone. Here’s what I learnt:
- Struzzo (but also ‘ostrich’, with Anglo-Norman and Old French influences) comes from the Latin Struthio camelus, which in turn is derived from two Greek words meaning ‘camel-like sparrow’. So it is a bird after all!
- Ostriches are originally from Africa, not Australia.
- Ostriches are known for not being able to fly, but they are fast runners and can kick predators hard if they feel threatened. Most interestingly for me, sticking their heads in the sand is a legend!
On a side note, while I was researching ostriches on the internet, a question in the People Also Ask box caught my attention: whether Muslims can eat ostriches. What kind of question is that?!
So there I was at 4am, studying the etymology of an ancient bird species, all because of a weird dream I’d had. If that doesn’t qualify me as a language nerd, I don’t know what does!
PS If you have any suggestions on how to interpret this dream, I’m all ears. Not to be polemic, but personally I can’t help seeing some analogy with the situation in Gaza, where people are dying of starvation in the desert while the Western world sticks its head in the sand – even though I now know that ostriches don’t actually do that, but try telling my Western mindset that!
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