Predating dinosaurs: as in ‘predators’ or ‘pre-dating’?
I’m scared.
Wait. They eat mosquitos?
How do I attract more of these flying dragons?
Water is the answer my friend.
Never had them in my yard, not that I noticed anyway. Buried an old trash can for a water feature. Bam. Dragonflies.
I have 3 other ponds. One is a $25 Home Depot pond and the other is a thrift-store witch’s cauldron. They all have a couple of goldfish in them, native water plants, and the trash can pond has a solar cell running a 12V water pump.
Serious question: Has any culture tried breeding these guys to keep mosquitoes at bay? Something like how people kept cats around to reduce the population of mice?
Interesting question! I’d guess, however you do it, you could only achieve a temporary uptick in the population. Like any other predator/prey relationship, the ecosystem can only support X predators. After all, the ancient Egyptians could only have so many cats around until they ran out of mice.
Be a pain to breed. They stay underwater as nymphs for 2 years, and that’s 2 years where you gotta keep them from being someone else’s lunch.
Do yourself a favor and watch this vid about dragonflies, it’s super cool: https://youtu.be/8i9WMD6xbuA
This would be more like un-stained glass than stained glass.
Great question! The answer is that, well, you don’t, but that’s not what I’m intending unstained to mean here.
As it turns out, “unstained” is structurally ambiguous, because English has two different “un-” prefixes, each of which has different functions and different category selection requirements.
The first attaches to verbs, and means “reverse the action of”, e.g. un-tie, un-do, un-stain, etc. The second attaches to adjectives, and means “not X”, e.g. un-happy, un-satisfied, etc.
So, if we want to form the word “undoable”, we can either take the verb “do” and attach “-able” first, giving us an adjective “doable” to which we can then add “un-” to give us “undoable”, an adjective meaning “not able to be done” (“Flying by flapping your arms is undoable”)
OR
We can take “do” and add the other “un-” first, giving us a verb “undo” meaning “to reverse the action of something” to which we can then add the suffix “-able”, giving us “undoable”, a different adjective meaning “able to be undone” (“Simple knots are easily undoable”)
So, while both of these look and sound like the same word, they actually have different structures that correspond to the differences in their meanings.
In my OP, you read “unstained” as “unstain-ed”, with “un-” attaching to “stain” to give a verb “unstain” meaning “to reverse the staining of”, and then added the participle suffix, while my intended structure was to attach “stain” and “-ed” first, giving a participle (adjective) “stained”, to which we can then add the other prefix “un-”, giving “un-stained” “not stained”.
