Doing a little extra plant study this evening (because we are so conscientious and simultaneously enthusiastic about tundra vegetation), the Jcrew ran across the word antiscorbutic. I didn’t know what it meant. Jeremy didn’t know what it meant. Jean said, “Is it about scurvy? It sounds kind of like it’s about scurvy.”

We said “Well, maybe,” but didn’t really believe her, because Jean speaks English as a second language and has only been in the United States since she was eleven. However, just because we have to try to define words like “adamant” and “pun” doesn’t mean that she isn’t absolutely right about a word that we found the definition for in an online “Dictionary of Difficult Words.”

Learning is SO GREAT. The other thing we learned today is that Ernie, the cute little baby ermine that scuttles around the Barrow dry site is actually Ernie #1 and Ernie #2. Without the benefit of digital photography we would spend half our budget on film at the rate we take pictures around Ernie(s), but (t)he(y) is/are lightning fast and only photographable at the rate of 3 good pictures to 74 bad ones.

If the Ernies were trained to bring us orange juice in the field, one could say that they were antiscorbutic.

an·ti·scor·bu·tic (nt-skôr-bytk, nt-)