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Discuss Email this Feedback RSS/XML Permalink A.Word.A.Day--friar's lantern This week's theme: whose what? friar's lantern (FRY-uhrz LAN-tuhrn) noun A phosphorescent light seen over marshy ground at night, caused by spontaneous combustion of gases emitted by decomposing organic matter. A synonym is foxfire (not Firefox), especially for luminescence produced by fungi. [The first use of the term is in John Milton's 1632 poem L'Allegro: "She was pinched and pulled, she said; / And he, by Friar's lantern led."] Today's word in Visual Thesaurus. -Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org) "Question: What do you get when you cross a firefly with a tobacco plant. Answer: A cigarette that lights itself. The joke quickly made the rounds after a group of genetic engineers in California earlier this month announced that they had transferred into the cells of a tobacco plant the gene that causes a firefly to glow. The tobacco plant seems to rise out of the page like a will-o'-the-wisp or friar's lantern." Chet Raymo; A Tale of a Firefly and a Tobacco Leaf; The Boston Globe; Nov 24, 1986. X-Bonus Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. -John Ruskin, author, art critic, and social reformer (1819-1900)

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