In your dreams they will come for you (Tunneling up from the Underdark edition)

[andrewducker]

These skaven courtesy of riotclitshave

Comments

[drjon.livejournal.com]

Those are what passes for Possums in the Americas, are they?

[andrewducker]

Clearly Skaven:

http://warhammeronline.wikia.com/wiki/Skaven

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

And have passed for that since before 1610, because the initial vowel of the Algonquian "aposoum" was only barely sounded, and Americans didn't cope well with words beginning with an apostrophe. (And yes, we _do_ seem unable to cope with apostrophes anywhere, at least in recent years.)

(Now I'm off to try to discover when Australians adopted "possum" as the name for their similar native marsupial, and to spectulate on why they didn't use some well-established Aboriginal term.)

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Currently, my speculation (typo-corrected) is that the Aborigines gave specific names to each of the animal species with which they interacted, and the British Invaders wanted a broad general term to cover "all those small, pesky, marsupials".

I might note, as an Aside, that here in Southern California we have two genetic strains of possums (or 'possums, or opossums) -- one that was introduced from Arkansas c. 1934, and one that has migrated up from Mexico within the past decade or two. We also have two genetic strains of the common hemerocallus ("daylilly") -- one introduce when the area was a Mexican colony, via the hide & tallow trade with China, and one brought a bit later by Anglo immigrants via the East Coast U.S. clipper-ship tea-trade with another area along the Chinese coast. In both these cases, only DNA investigation can tell us which population we're dealing with.

I also note that I find our possums -- especially when young -- rather cute, even though tlhey hiss and show their sharp little teeth when startled, but they're really too stupid to make good pets.