Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-188432-20130505035914/@comment-7302713-20130507063818

CzechOut wrote: Hmmm, I guess i can see that reading, but the pronoun it in "What was it, exactly" is closest to "the Crimson Horror", so I'd lean toward believing that they are defining the Crimson Horror. I disagree. The Doctor has a habit of starting to say one thing, getting himself off-topic with an irrelevant aside and then switching back to the original topic all in one breath. In this exchange the Doctor gets diverted from the topic (red leech) for a second because he has to comment on how scary it sounds (Oooooh. "The repulsive red leech"!) and then on how he thinks that the townspeople in Victorian times were clearly better at naming things then the Silirians were bajillions of years ago (Nah, on balance, I think I prefer "the Crimson Horror".) before actually replying to Vastra and asking for further information.

"What was it, exactly?" is a reply to Vastra saying "and our greatest plague, the most virulent enemy, was the repulsive red leech". The stuff he says before that in that line isn't a reply to her, it's the Doctor finding the urgency of stopping the bad guys not quite urgent enough to keep him from wasting time remarking on who comes up with better names. He's not saying that "the Crimson Horror" is a better name for this animal, he's saying it's a better name, period.

I think that we should have Red Leech - the animal Crimson Tide - the devastation of the red dead bodies The Crimson Tide TV story - the episode ???? - poison secreted by the Red Leech The problem is that we don't really have name for the poison that isn't also the name the penny dreadfuls gave to the bodies. We can't have separate articles for the dead bodies and the poison without using a conjecture title like "Red Leech poison".