Found in My E-mail Inbox This Morning

. . . along with lebenty-leben appeals for me to save The Republic by sending my correspondent money.  Even if I were going to send off a boatload of money, how do I know he's who he says he is and not a confidence trickster, a miscreant, a ne'er-do-well, a scofflaw?  There's that to consider.

Where was I?

Oh, yes.   A little factoid of no discernible significance but which I nevertheless found interesting:

16th century Spanish explorers referred to the large reptiles they found in the Americas as “el lagarto de Indias,” or “the lizard of the Indies.” Thanks to their phrase and a few phonetic shifts as it made the jump to English, we now refer to those same large reptiles as alligators.