What's On the Inside . . .

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. ~Buckminster Fuller

Caterpillars are awkward, slinky-ish creatures that slugglishly traverse concrete sidewalks in spring and summer. Seldom will one hear them described in ethereal terms like "elusive." No, caterpillars can be detrimental to crops. Pests. Voracious eaters of leaves. Personally, I find them creepy little critters.

When will Hollywood discover this and make a horror movie about man-eating caterpillars?

Yet from those woolly, hairy, larval Lepidoptera emerge beautiful butterflies. Frankly, the only reason that prevents me from squashing a caterpillar in its pathway is the thought that I might be killing a future Monarch butterfly.

Recently I read that there is something known as the "butterfly problem" in linguistics (which oddly enough was being discussed by a group of mathematicians at Santa Clara University). The word for "butterfly" is different in almost every language, even those closely related like Spanish and Portuguese. Papillon. Mariposa. Petalou'da. Schmetterling. Farfala. Parpar. Lupe lupe. Woo deep. Labalaba. From a list of over 50 translations of the term, no two appeared the same. To contrast -- for the term "cat," virtually every language mirrors the next: gato, gatto, chat, kat, katt, kot, chat, katze, gata.

Cats are just so commonplace. Butterflies? Well . . . they're not.

So why the universal uniqueness of the word butterfly?

According to Haj Ross, "The concept/image of the butterfly is a uniquely powerful one in the group minds of the world's cultures with its somewhat unpromising start as a caterpillar followed by its dazzling finish of visual symmetry, coupled with motional unforgettability of the butterfly's flipzagging path through our consciousness."

So it seems logical to me that no two languages could capture the essence of a butterfly with the same word or phrase. Butterflies symbolize transformation. Poetry in motion. Grace. Children chase them. Photographers capture them. And it seems like everyone adores them.

Not bad for something that started out in the body of a caterpillar.