The Rockefeller State Park Preserve near Pleasantville, New York, features a fine example of a glacial erratic, a giant rock left behind thousands of years ago by a glacier as it moved. In this case, the word erratic functions as a noun. Both the noun erratic and its adjectival form meaning “haphazard” or “inconsistent” derive from Latin errare, “to wander,” the source also of error and knight errant, the term for “a medieval knight who travels about seeking chivalrous adventures.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Glacial Erratic”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. My wife and I just got back from a week in the Hudson River Valley, where, as you know, there’s a lot of wonderful hiking. And one of our favorites was the Rockefeller State Park Preserve, which is near Pleasantville. And we were wandering around this beautiful preserve when we saw this sign that was pointing to something called the Glacial Erratic Trail.
And we were thinking, well, what’s a glacial erratic trail? Is it a really tough trail that you have to take at a glacial pace or is it so erratic its it’s just zigzagging along with a lot of switchbacks? So we had to find out, of course, so we’re walking down this trail and we come to a clearing. And there in front of us, all by itself, is this huge boulder, and I’m talking about a boulder that’s the size of a two or three story house. And it’s just alone there in the woods, surrounded by trees.
And we were thinking, what the heck? But then we saw a little sign. And that’s when I learned that the word erratic isn’t necessarily an adjective, because in geology, it can function as a noun. An erratic is a rock or boulder that’s been transported by a glacier as the glacier is moving. And they’re often transported for hundreds of miles. And this particular one was left thousands of years ago after the ice that had covered that whole valley melted away.
It left behind this thing called a glacial erratic. And that’s when it all made sense to me, because the adjective erratic means, you know, inconsistent or haphazard. And it comes from the Latin errare, which means to wander. It’s also the source of our word error, because if you make an error, you wander from the path. And so it was a little lesson in geology, but it was also a little linguistic reminder that sometimes if you assume that a word is a particular part of speech, you may be in error.
And so there’s a connection here to knights errants. Knights errants are knights who wander. Yes. Yes. They’re wandering around. Freelancers, right? Literally. Freelancers, yeah, the Ronin of the medieval world.
But if you see something out there and you’ve got a question about it, what is the erratic errant message in your world? You’re like, that doesn’t mean what I think it means, does it? We can help you solve that.
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