[Lexicog] lady bug

[Kenneth C. Hill]

The ladybug is also known as a lady-bird or a lady beetle. "Lady beetle"
seems to be used because of the fact that "true bugs" belong to the order
Hemiptera and beetles belong to the Coleoptera, and the ladybug is a
beetle. This raises the interesting lexicographical fact that there is a
movement among English speakers to create an English technical vocabulary
for biota, as if the international Latin vocabulary wasn't good enough.
For people of that frame of mind, it is simply *wrong* to refer to a
beetle as a bug since they have decided that "bug" is to restricted to the
members Hemiptera.

By the way, I have it on fairly good authority that the original "bug" in
computer programming was a member of the order Lepidoptera, a moth. A moth
got into an early (vacuum tube-based) computer and short-circuited
something. Thereafter when programmers found faults with how their
programs worked, they jokingly blamed them on that bug that somehow got in
there.

--Ken



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