Most English words we take for granted. Never think about them. They mean what they mean and ably serve their function. Then there are the smattering of words we love not because of their meaning but their sound. Actually more than sound: the pleasurable feel of speaking them. Mine include serendipity, euphoria, and melancholy. But what words would we love to hear and say if only we knew them? I’m not talking about any in the vast pool of 171,476 in current use and listed with full meanings in the Oxford English Dictionary. Or even any among the OEA‘s 47,156 obsolete words.
There are the smattering of words we love not because of their meaning but their sound.
In classic serendipity while browsing Futility Closet, I stumbled upon an obsolete word not even in the OED, a word that immediately appealed to me because it describes something so deserving of its own word. But what seemed like the most logical way to pronounce kumatage — phonetically — gives it no aural or oral appeal. After much searching, I found the correct pronunciation courtesy of Endangered Words: A Collection of Rare Gems for Book Lovers by Simon Hertnon. Koo-mah-TAHZH is rhythmic, exotic, and beautiful. How fitting given the meaning. According to The New American Practical Navigator, published in 1837, a kumatage is:
A bright appearance in the horizon, under the sun or moon, arising from the reflected light of those bodies from the small rippling waves on the surface of the water.
Why the word faded away into obsolescence is a mystery. If another word replaced kumatage, I can’t find it. And the fate of kumatage makes me wonder: is there a word for things that deserve a word but don’t have one?
I’ve written before about a cinematic injustice that several decades later I can’t forgive. Maybe that’s why I’ve dawdled at seeing the updated version of True Grit despite positive reviews and an admirable cast. Now Salon weighs in with its Top 10 of Oscar oversights, eight of which I’m old enough to remember but doesn’t include mine. As for my favorite movie of 2010, no way it wins the best movie Oscar. At least academy members saw fit to nominate Winter’s Bone, which has grossed a modest $6.3 million. I’ve encountered no other film as rich in its faithfulness to a memorable novel, capturing so vividly its place and people and the forces that shape them. Both book and movie convey an unrelenting desperation from which no escape seems possible — until an unlikely character’s determination creates cracks in the bleakness, and glimmers of hope shine through.
Stumbling upon intersecting observations by two writers today, I was reminded of a vacation several years ago at the Olympic Peninsula’s northwestern tip. I was drinking coffee in the lobby of a lodge. A new guest was checking in. The innkeeper, making small talk, asked what he did for a living. “I work for Duke Energy in North Carolina,” the man answered. With barely a pause he added, as if reading from his business card, “And global warming has nothing to do with carbon emissions.” I regret not asking him what that day’s crystalline sky would have looked like if CO2 was pink instead of invisible.
The writers who triggered that memory are Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker, whose 2006 book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, slapped me awake to what we’re doing to the planet. The second is by Marilynne Robinson, the acclaimed novelist whose new work of non-fiction, Absence of Mind, tackles science, religion, and human consciousness. Read More
What’s the context of these quotes from the epigraph page of a book I bought today? Not the unfolding torture scandal, though it could be. Instead they set the tone for Savages & Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire Through Indian Territory by Paul VanDevelder. Read More
I’m lost in the Lost City of Z. When I open the book in bed at night, my world disappears. Reality becomes author David Grann‘s riveting account of the obsessive hunt for a place that may have never existed.
Grann had phenomenal material without visiting what may be the remotest place on Earth. His adventure, blended discreetly into a multi-layered story, brings the narrator alive on the page and leavens his dire accounts of explorers forever lost in Amazon jungle. Read More
Never has apocalypse looked so beautiful. That was my first thought today upon seeing four photographs from a 1970 French nuclear test. Then I thought of my childhood and pilot friend, whose Army adventures included flying helicopters to a radiated and cratered South Pacific atoll to help repair what an atomic bomb had wrought.
Then came the flash of another high school classmate whose house in the 1960s had the only fully functioning backyard bomb shelter I ever saw. It was also the site of romantic encounters — none mine. Read More
I’ve entered a different world. Not the present one that’s changed so much, seemingly overnight. No, it’s one of many that famed science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick created.
Although others have long extolled him to me, I haven’t ventured into Dick’s genre for years. (I’m not counting science- fiction movies, including some based on his work, notably Blade Runner.)
Troubled times may explain the sudden appeal of Dick’s often prescient tales. Reading The Man in the High Castle, in which Germanyt and Japan have won World War II and subdivided the United States, is a haunting escape. It’s also Dick’s chilling reminder that the real world ahead could turn out far different than we expect.
Recently I stumbled upon old snapshots of unidentified people I can’t get out of my head.
The photos are on two web sites, waiting for someone to give names to faces. One site features more than 500 color images from film found in cameras at flea markets and second-hand stores. The other site consists of 44 black and white pictures that have haunted a man since he found the negatives at a garage sale 15 years ago. Read More
Anyone doubting the grassroots power of online social media should consider this story, which I wrote for today’s edition of The Oregonian.
Without Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, a son’s heart-warming attempt to help his mother’s financially ailing bookstore would have never reached and connected with so many people so quickly. Read More
I worked on a book about a world-famous rodeo for 18 months with another writer, Ann Terry Hill. I also did extensive digging for old photographs. Recreating events from decades ago based on historical research was exhilarating. Nothing motivates me like the thrill of the hunt for hard-to-unearth information.
At the outset, most of what I knew about rodeos I learned from TV as a kid. The deeper into the project I went, the more I was moved by the triumphs and travails of cowboys, cowgirls, and Indians — notably those in the early part of the last century. Read More
Hate knows no boundaries, judging from a map compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It’s especially disconcerting to see the presence of hate groups in my city, Portland.
But I’m not naïve about such matters. After all, I grew up mainly in the South. Not that racism wasn’t rampant in the Northwest. I’ve read extensively about the Ku Klux Klan’s robust activities in Oregon during the early part of the last century. Read More
No one who’s eighty says, “The years have dragged on and on. When is this thing going to finally end?”
So I wasn’t surprised to hear my father say on his eightieth birthday, “I’m amazed at how quickly it’s gone by.” Read More
We sit at long tables, nearly one hundred of us, amid fields of bounty. It’s Sauvie Island, ten miles west of Portland. I can smell the earth, fertile from Columbia River floods. The sun eases toward the hills, setting aglow acres of vegetables sprawling between guardian white oaks half a millennium old. Read More
