Gardner-Serpollet

Serpolet is the French word for wild thyme — Thymus serpyllum, the low creeping herb that grows on chalk downland and smells of summer when you stand on it.

The Latin does share a root with serpens: serpyllum, from a sense of creeping along the ground. So there is a linguistic thread, and it runs through the plant’s habit of spreading horizontally rather than through anything with a spine. Wild thyme was named a serpent-thing because of how it moves across the earth, which is a more poetic observation than most botanists get to make.

Léon Serpollet was, meanwhile, one of the genuinely important engineers of the early automobile. His flash boiler — which generated steam almost instantly rather than requiring a large heated reservoir — solved the steam car’s worst practical problem, and his cars were fast, refined and beautifully made. In 1902 at Nice he took a machine nicknamed the Œuf de Pâques, the Easter Egg, to a world record of a little over 120 km/h.

He died in 1907 and the company went with him, and steam lost its last serious advocate in Europe.

The Ophidiary denies the entry and records it anyway, because a false cognate this good is worth more than most true ones. Every English speaker who reads Serpollet hears a snake. Every French speaker smells thyme. Both of them are looking at the same wooden-wheeled steam car.