In my February Diary I had a passing mention of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, with whom I had a brief intellectual flirtation many, many years ago. Turns out the old coot is still alive. He’ll be 100 on November 28.

Here’s an arresting snippet from Lévi-Strauss’s Wikipedia entry:

In 1962, Lévi-Strauss published what is for many people his most important work, La Pensée Sauvage. The title is a pun untranslatable in English — in English the book is known as The Savage Mind, but this title fails to capture the other possible French meaning of ‘Wild Pansies’. In French pensée means both ‘thought’ and ‘pansy,’ the flower, while sauvage means ‘wild’ as well as ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’. The book concerns primitive thought, forms of thought we all use. (Lévi-Strauss suggested the English title be Pansies for Thought, riffing off of a speech by Ophelia in Hamlet.) The French edition to this day retains a flower on the cover.