Flesh! and calenture.

In the comments to that first post of the day today, the one about the caveman diet, St. George said:

Interesting how "trash" is used to make food and how it is marketed.

Would you eat a Chapul bar?

Dates, chocolate, walnuts, flax, peanuts, and protein flour..i.e. ground processed cricket flesh.

The smaller the animals people eat, the poorer the civilization.

The scam here is that it's being marketed to appeal to people as a politically-conscious "revolutionary" food choice that benefits the environment...and your body!

I said:

Do insects have "flesh"? Isn't "flesh" just muscle... and do insects have "muscle"... and if not, what do they have that enables them to move?

From Wikipedia's article on "flesh":

With regard to biology, flesh is the soft substance of a human or other animal body that consists of muscle and fat; for vertebrate, this especially includes muscle tissue (skeletal muscle), as opposed to bones and viscera. Flesh may be used as food, in which case it is commonly called meat.

So... for the invertebrate, what are we talking about? Lobsters have flesh, right? Is it muscle or something more akin to the goo that exudes from a stepped-on grasshopper?

I've never thought about this before, but I see that insects do have muscles:

Unlike vertebrates that have both smooth and striated muscles, insects have only striated muscles. Muscle cells are amassed into muscle fibres and then into the functional unit, the muscle. Muscles are attached to the body wall, with attachment fibres running through the cuticle and to the epicuticle, where they can move different parts of the body including appendages such as wings. The muscle fibre has many cells with a plasma membrane and outer sheath or sarcolemma. The sarcolemma is invaginated and can make contact with the tracheole carrying oxygen to the muscle fibre. Arranged in sheets or cylindrically, contractile myofibrils run the length of the muscle fibre. Myofibrils comprising a fine actin filament enclosed between a thick pair of myosin filaments slide past each other instigated by nerve impulses.

The sarcolemma is invaginated... There is so much I don't know.

I looked up "flesh" in the (unlinkable) OED and what caught my eye — and this is one reason there's so much I don't know: I go with what's catching my eye at the moment — was the separate entry for "flesh!" "Flesh" with an exclamation point had its own entry, definition 9(d): "As a profane oath, God's flesh! Hence in 17–18th c. in ejaculations, as flesh! flesh and fire!" Example:

1695   W. Congreve Love for Love iii. i. 52   Flesh, you don't think I'm false-hearted, like a Land-man.

Here's the full text of Congreve's "Love for Love," in which I also found:

Look you, young woman, you may learn to give good words... if you should give such language at sea, you'd have a cat o' nine tails laid cross your shoulders. Flesh! who are you?

And:

Flesh, I believe all the calentures of the sea are come ashore, for my part.

Calenture. What is it? The OED says:

A disease incident to sailors within the tropics, characterized by delirium in which the patient, it is said, fancies the sea to be green fields, and desires to leap into it.

It's used in "The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe":

Yet even in this voyage I had my misfortunes too; particularly, that I was continually sick, being thrown into a violent calenture by the excessive heat of the climate....

In this distress we had, besides the terror of the storm, one of our men die of the calenture, and one man and the boy washed overboard....

"Calenture" can also be used figuratively to mean "Fever; burning passion, ardour, zeal, heat, glow."

A useful word, then, and a vivid exciting concept of madness, and yet we've lost it. I searched for it in the archives of the NYT and found little more than this "In the Woods" correspondence from July 16, 1866:

Why fix the date, my dear Editor, when the days of this torrid month lose distinction by fusion, and should be counted by calenture rather than calendar? Or why give you any place but that large suggestion of breezes and cafage? Enough to say that I write from a paradise of the fly-fisher — from one of those table lands above the reach of railroads, of which there are several yet unprofaned within the imporial limits of our State, from whose flanks...

Fleshly flanks, possibly invaginated...

... the streams run three several ways to join as many great rivers, springing secret and cold among forests whose skirts only the lumberman and the tanner have lifted.

Flesh! Do you feel a burning passion to speak and write with archaic locutions? The NYT correspondent infused writing about the landscape with sexuality, many years before we threw ourselves overboard into the seemingly green fields of direct talk about sex with real, human naked bodies and the porno films, "flesh flicks."