Really interesting- in Irish ladybirds are also called "Bóin Dé" or God's Little Cow, so following a similar convention. I also wonder if the current name comes from "Our Lady's Bird"? There seems to have been a vogue for giving ironically overblown names to really tiny animals - wrens were God's or Mary's Hen, and little fuzzy moth caterpillars were called God's Horse - though I grew up calling them Hairy Mollies (and was told in common but incorrect folklore that they had a bad sting).
Irish is often quite lazily direct with names - a large number of animals are simply referred to as varieties of cat or dog - Pine Martens are Cat Crainn or tree cats, while a water dog or Madra Uisce is an otter. There's also the infamous name for jellyfish- Smogairle Róin, or Seal Snot...
> I also wonder if the current name comes from "Our Lady's Bird"?
It does indeed! Ladybirds also have names related to the Virgin Mary in a lot of other European languages. There's a great episode of the podcast The Allusionist about names for ladybirds: https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/ladybird
I rather like "trash panda" for raccoons, because red pandas and raccoons were long thought to be fellow-members of the family Procyonidae. Though red pandas are now classified as their own family within the superfamily Musteloidea (which also contains procyonids like raccoons, and also mustelids like weasels, otters and badgers): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ailuridae#Classification
[Giant pandas, being bears, are more distantly related - in fact, red pandas are more closely related to seals than they are to giant pandas.]
in my native Hungarian, "God's Little Cow" is used for referring to Lygaeus equestris, which, according to Wikipedia, the English rather disappointingly call black-and-red-bug.
Really interesting- in Irish ladybirds are also called "Bóin Dé" or God's Little Cow, so following a similar convention. I also wonder if the current name comes from "Our Lady's Bird"? There seems to have been a vogue for giving ironically overblown names to really tiny animals - wrens were God's or Mary's Hen, and little fuzzy moth caterpillars were called God's Horse - though I grew up calling them Hairy Mollies (and was told in common but incorrect folklore that they had a bad sting).
Irish is often quite lazily direct with names - a large number of animals are simply referred to as varieties of cat or dog - Pine Martens are Cat Crainn or tree cats, while a water dog or Madra Uisce is an otter. There's also the infamous name for jellyfish- Smogairle Róin, or Seal Snot...
> I also wonder if the current name comes from "Our Lady's Bird"?
It does indeed! Ladybirds also have names related to the Virgin Mary in a lot of other European languages. There's a great episode of the podcast The Allusionist about names for ladybirds: https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/ladybird
I rather like "trash panda" for raccoons, because red pandas and raccoons were long thought to be fellow-members of the family Procyonidae. Though red pandas are now classified as their own family within the superfamily Musteloidea (which also contains procyonids like raccoons, and also mustelids like weasels, otters and badgers): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ailuridae#Classification
[Giant pandas, being bears, are more distantly related - in fact, red pandas are more closely related to seals than they are to giant pandas.]
So... why are woodlice called slaters in Scotland?
in my native Hungarian, "God's Little Cow" is used for referring to Lygaeus equestris, which, according to Wikipedia, the English rather disappointingly call black-and-red-bug.
As a kid in Kent and Surrey, we called them cheesybugs
Where I grew up in Kent, the propensity of wood lice to curl up into balls meant they were known as pea bugs.