One of the things that people who don’t know anything about white rhinoceroses find most interesting about them is their colour. It isn’t white. Not even remotely. It’s a rather handsome dark grey. Not even a sort of pale grey that might arguably pass as an off-white, just plain dark grey. People therefore assume that zoologists are either perverse or colour-blind, but it’s not that, it’s that they’re illiterate. “White” is a mistranslation of the Afrikaans word weit, meaning “wide,” and it refers to the animal’s mouth, which is wider than that of the black rhino. By one of those lucky
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