‘Evening primrose: any plant of the genus Oenothera with flowers opening
in the evening and wilting the next day’. Follow this entry in The New
Shorter Oxford Dictionary with a search for a definition of Oenothera, and
you trip across an unknown narcotic plant from Greece, known as the wine
trap, the fact that plants opening by day and closing by night are called
sundrops, that an oersted is defined as one gilbert per maxwell and a handy
run through of the oestrogen family of steroids. Oxford’s two-volume dictionary
is a bargain at Pounds sterling 60 for 3800 pages.
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