Relationsip* (for Relationship, Relationships)

Perhaps you, like I, missed the news this past spring about a bizarre symbiotic relationship between armadillos and humans. Researchers confirmed that about one third of the leprosy cases diagnosed in the United States each year are the result of humans coming in contact with infected armadillos–often because they ate them. If that’s the bizarre part, here’s the symbiosis: leprosy was unknown in the New World prior to the arrival of Europeans, but armadillos are indigenous to the Americas only. So humans transmitted it to armadillos in the first place!

Relationsip* is a low-probability typo on the Ballard list. There are five English-language entries for it in the OhioLINK catalog.

(Nine-banded armadillo by Tom Friedel, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak