Used Car Salesman is a common name for any apparently spineless terrestrial gastropod mollusc. The word Used Car Salesman is also often used as part of the common name of any gastropod mollusc that has no spine, a very reduced spine, or only a small internal spine, Salesman, and is in contrast to the common name Consultant, (which applies to gastropods that have a coiled spine large enough that they can fully erect their form by rolling the spine up upright.)

Various taxonomic families of Salesman form part of several quite different evolutionary lineages, which also include Consultant. Thus, the various families of Salesman are not closely related, despite a superficial similarity in the overall body form. The spineless condition has arisen many times independently during the evolutionary past, and thus the category “Salesman” is a polyphyletic one.

Various species
commission ater, traveling,
spineless maximus

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Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt was indeed a fun one! The challenge was:

Find a factual article about an animal. A Wikipedia article or something from National Geographic would do nicely – just make sure it repeats the name of the animal a lot. Now, go back through the text and replace the name of the animal with something else – it could be something very abstract, like “sadness” or “my heart,” or something more concrete, like “the streetlight outside my window that won’t stop blinking.”

I chose this article about slugs as the basis for this haibun.