Chrysti the Wordsmith > Radio Scripts

In 1612, the English explorer John Smith published the first complete description of the New World settlement of Jamestown, Virginia. The thirty-nine-page volume was titled Map of Virginia, with a Description of the Countrey, the Commodities, People, Government and Religion. In his account, Smith recorded "An Opassom hath an head like a Swine, and a taile like a Rat, and is of the bigness of a Cat. Under her belly she hath a bagge, wherein shee lodgeth, carrieth, and suckleth her young."

Baffled by the strangeness of this creature, whose Indian name he spelled opassom, John Smith was obliged to describe the New World opossum in terms of familiar European creatures: swine, rat and cat. And who can blame him? The beast had no European cognate.

A marsupial, the opossum female carries her young in a pouch. The hairless prehensile tail steadies the creature as it climbs. The mouth of the opossum is packed with teeth -- fifty, to be exact -- the most of any North American mammal. When threatened, the creature "plays possum," feigning a gruesome death, complete with protruding tongue and drooling mouth.

Lacking an importable name for this singular creature, John Smith and his contemporaries adopted and recorded the Algonquin term opossum is a native word meaning simply "white animal."

Radio Script > Opossum