the.com/blight
nature's eviction notice, served cold to anything green enough to ignore it
means A disease or condition that kills or damages plants, often spreading rapidly; more broadly, anything that spoils or ruins something once healthy or thriving.
from The word surfaces in English in the early 17th century, first as a farmers' term for the sudden withering that struck crops and trees seemingly overnight. Its deeper roots are genuinely uncertain — etymologists shrug here — though it may be related to Old English words for a pale or sickly color, since blighted plants take on that ghostly, drained look. From the field it spread to cities, where a 'blighted' neighborhood is one let to rot.
- famine maker
- Potato blight starved a million Irish in the 1840s
- sneaky spores
- Late blight can wipe a field in days
- urban cousin
- Cities legally declare buildings blighted to bulldoze them
- fungus impostor
- The potato killer is actually a water mold
- chestnut killer
- Blight erased four billion American chestnut trees
irish potato famine — phytophthora infestans destroyed crops in ireland 1845-1852, killing ~1 million people
dutch elm disease — fungal pathogen killed over 100 million elm trees across north america and europe since 1930
late blight pennsylvania — tomato and potato crops in pennsylvania heavily affected annually, especially wet seasons