He’s good on metaphors
I was reading a Victorian magazine today (as you do) and came upon the phrase “under a Upas tree.” So I axed my robot friend (as you do).
The Upas tree – Antiaris toxicaria – is a large tree native to Southeast Asia and parts of the Pacific. It produces a toxic latex that some Southeast Asian tribes used to tip arrows.
In the late 18th C, a dutchman wrote in a London magazine that the Upas, which grew in a remote valley in Java, was so deadly that it killed animals and plants for miles around it. This incorretoid made it into several guidebooks and travel books (and at least one poem). I mean, it’s poisonous, but it’s not that poisonous.
By the mid 19th C (the period of my magazine), they knew it wasn’t true, but it was firmly fixed as a metaphor for insidious and pervasive evil: bad political systems, immoral people, or destructive ideas.
The robot took pages to tell me all this. I’m’a start calling him ChattyGPT.
March 17, 2026 — 6:37 pm
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