The Day I Met A Unicorn
Posted: Sunday, January 25, 2009
by Joel Kontinen
http://joelkontinen.blogspot.com/
Many people would think that we can only see unicorns in illustrated fairy tales. The word comes from the Latin unicornis, one-horned'. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which in spite of its name is not exactly short but has half a million entries in two thick volumes, defines it as "a mythical animal with the body of a horse and a single straight horn projecting from its forehead". Don't believe everything just because you see it printed on the pages of a book. Even dictionaries can be unreliable.
If you read my first column on SearchWarp, you might remember that I spent part of my childhood in Kenya. When I was about eight or nine, my parents took me and my little brother to a zoo in Rumuruti, not far from the area where George and Joy Adamson had their lioness Elsa and her cubs of the Born Free renown.
Orphaned animals, some of them exceptionally tame, were kept in the zoo. We could ride a giant tortoise and pat little elephants.
They also had a unicorn. Yes, they had. But it did not look like the illustrations I'd seen in some books of a horse-like creature with a big long horn. This fellow looked more like a rhinoceros to me. There was a small protuberance behind the one horn at the top of its nose. It would eventually grow into a second smaller horn.
Yes, the unicorn I met was a young rhino. Some rhinoceros only have one horn.
Actually, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary also gives another definition for a unicorn. It can be "a one-horned rhinoceros".
Our culture has predisposed us to think that unicorns are mythological animals. But in this case, the "mythological" creature was very real, although not quite what we might have supposed.
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Hi Joel.Lucky you! You got to be that close to a rhinoceros. What an adventure you youth must have been.The whole point about perceptions (and this is my perception of your article) is well made.DianneHi Dianne. Thanks for reading. To be honest, I must have been a bit scared. But the rhino was tame and good-natured, or I wouldn't be writing about it.Regards,Joel
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