A WORD, PLEASE — dandelion

continuity: Next, Professor Aubrey Vellum, with a little yellow flower that has been quietly showing its teeth.

the verdict: You know the moment. You pick a fluffy white dandelion clock, take a big breath, make a wish, and blow, and a hundred tiny parachutes go drifting off across the lawn.

a word, please: Dandelion. A word, please.

the crack: People love to say the name comes from the flower itself, because that shaggy yellow head looks like a lion's golden mane. Some even say it's a 'dandy lion,' a very well-dressed beast. They're lovely stories, and they aren't true. The real one is better, and it's hiding down by your feet. Pick a dandelion leaf and look at its edge. It's cut into sharp, jagged points, like a row of fangs. Medieval herbalists writing in Latin noticed exactly that, and they named the plant dens leonis , which means 'lion's tooth.' French apothecaries, the chemists of their day, translated it straight across into dent de lion , which still means 'tooth of the lion.'

the collision: In the late thirteen hundreds, England was a country that spoke French in its courts and English in its kitchens, and dent de lion slipped across the Channel along with the medicine. For a while, English speakers dutifully said all three words. But give English a long mouthful and it starts chewing. Over the next two hundred years, dent de lion got rubbed smooth into one easy word, dandelion. The lion is still in there. He's just curled up and gone quiet. And here's the wink. The French handed us that polite name, and then most of them stopped using it. In everyday French the plant is a pissenlit , a 'wet-the-bed,' because it was famous for sending you running to the bathroom. So we kept the lion's tooth, and they kept the joke. Meanwhile the weedkiller adverts call it a pest, and every child in the world calls it a wish.

the glimmer: One little flower gets two names, and each one tells you what people noticed first. A name is really a small portrait of whoever did the naming.

the exit: That's the word. Next time you blow one, check the leaves. The lion's still showing his teeth.