# Names, animals, and meanings (F) *The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 29 Jul 1998* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### mary whalen *29 Jul 1998, 08:27* This is Sean Whalen (prion). Feather. A light shaft with many thin barbs protruding from it along one (imaginary) plane that contains the shaft. Biological, used by birds, usually to help in flight. Feather is a boy at Silk's palaestra. The only relation he seems to have with his name is that he's falling when Silk is enlightened and Silk's perception of time slows, so he would seem to be falling slowly, like a feather. Feeler. A sensory limb or projection of an animal, such as a tentacle or antenna. Femur. Plural femurs or femora. The thighbone, from the hip to the knee. The largest and longest bone in humans. Incus' older brother. It is a bone with an irregular Latin plural, like Incus. Fulmar. Procellariidae Fulmarus glacialis. Also called the fulmar petrel or the northern fulmar. A seabird living in the North Atlantic Ocean. About a foot and a half long. Eats fish and floating debris (they have increased in numbers due to getting more of this debris in the form of waste from fishing). Hunted for prized feathers, eggs, and oil. This is a member of the black mechanics. The name was probably chosen partly because of the unpleasant association of the bird feeding on garbage. However, fulmar is very close to fulminate, which comes from the Latin word fulmen, lightning, which has close associations with electricity. prion ---