A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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blubber
The thick layer of vascularized fat under the skin of whales, seals, and walruses — not simple fat but a fibrous, collagen-laced tissue that does several jobs at once. It insulates, it stores energy for months of fasting, it adds buoyancy, and in the large whales it stiffens the body wall enough to contribute to swimming. On a bowhead, it can run half a meter thick.
Etymology
Middle English bluber, meaning a bubble or foam, and probably imitative — the sound of something wet and swelling. The word moved outward from there in two directions. It was applied to the frothy fat of whales by the 1600s, at the point when the northern whale fishery made the substance economically enormous, and it became the verb for crying noisily, from the bubbling of the sounds rather than the fat. Same word, one lineage, two meanings that no longer look like relations.
Notes
Blubber’s insulating value depends on blood flow, not just thickness — the animal can flood or shut down vessels in the layer to dump or hold heat, so the same tissue works in polar water and in a warm bay.