Raemie L. – you wonderful person, you! Oh, once research gets into your blood, it is damned hard to not research everything. I know, I have two librarians and a lawyer in my immediate family. Great job!

Happy New Year, Raemie L., and many more research topics ahead for you in 2009!

HIPPO BOTTOMUS!

(Sounds like a Harry Potter chant, I know.)

TEE HEE…”BLORPEDO”.

Can you imagine this on
IMAX?

Katrina – I didn’t know what hippopotamus is in Norwegian, but my guess is, they’ve translated the meanings of “hippopotamus” from Greek or Latin (“river horse”) into their language (“flodhest”), instead of borrowing directly from a foreign language. Perhaps it was to preserve the language?
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hippopotamus
Disclaimer: I don’t speak or know anything about Scandinavian languages. Perhaps if someone who does speak it is interested, they can elaborate or correct this.

B/c I felt like looking it up and blabbering about my findings despite having errands to run, I used Dictionary.com’s Multilingual Dictionary feature to look up “hippopotamus”, “river”, and “horse”. “Hippopotamus” is (at least spelled) “flodhest” in Norwegian and Danish, and similar-looking in Swedish (“flodhäst”) and Icelandic (“flóðhestur”). “Horse” comes up as “hest” in Norwegian, but the search result on “river” comes up as a different word in Norwegian (“elv”) but also shows “flod” as “river” in Danish and Swedish, so, *shrugs*. I don’t think I can dig further than that. Again, I don’t know the history of Scandinavian languages, so for all I know, the Norwegians could have borrowed the term from their neighbors who translated and coined the term first. =P

Uh… this is pointlessly long. I’m off to the store!

This falls under the rule about a thing and a smaller version of the thing being SO CUTE!!!

I’m feeling pretty thin in comparison.

J’aime bein les hioppotomme-

‘floodehest’ (SP?) is Norwegian for hippopotamus- my question is, why would Norwegians HAVE a word for hippopotamus? Just wondering…..

Those leggies and feetsies are just tooooo wonderful- yes, they DO look as if they should twirl! And the baby snausage is soo cute!

@The feetsies!!! They kinda look like (real) propellers!

zomg, the blorpedo (ha!) link’s image! I really made a high-pitched squee sound when I saw the bebeh hippo. Cute and deadleh blorpedo!