Hourglass valley, ribbon fall, gallery forest, and ephemeral creek may not be in standard dictionaries, but they’re terms often used in parts of the United States to denote features of the landscape particular to various places. Writers Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney have gathered more than 800 of these terms and asked well-known authors to research and write short entries about each of them. The result is Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape, a lovely compilation that poses the question: What do we lose if these words are forgotten? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Home Ground: Landscape Language”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, this show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Ephemeral Creek.
Ribbonfall.
Hourglass Valley.
Gallery Forest.
You won’t see these terms in most dictionaries, but they’ve been used for years in various locales to describe the things that people see in and on the land.
And they’re part of a vocabulary that most of us rarely, if ever, encounter.
A vocabulary of place.
Like take the term gallery forest, for example.
It’s a forest that grows along the banks of a river in open prairie country.
Sometimes their canopies on either side grow close enough together to form a tunnel-like corridor over the water.
And the term gallery forest is adapted from the Spanish galleria, or overhanging balcony.
There are more than 800 of these terms in a remarkable book that came out a few years ago.
Called Home Ground, Language for an American Landscape.
And the editors, Barry Lopez and Deborah Gwartney, approached the challenge of compiling these terms in a really interesting way.
They asked 45 well-known writers, people like John Krakauer and Terry Tempest Williams and Luis Urea and Barbara Kingsolver, to research these words in the standard, specialized reference works and then write brief entries about them, explaining what the terms mean in the parts of the continent where you’re likely to encounter them.
And Grant, the book is really a kind of tonic for the mind.
It’s this new lens for looking at the environment.
And it forces you to ponder, what do we lose if we don’t have the terms to talk about the features of a landscape or the environment?
What happens if we had those words once, but increasingly they’re forgotten?
I agree. Yes, I’ve browsed this book, and I find it beautiful and evocative.
It’s a book that I think you want when you’re lonely even.
I think you can page through this book and find a connection to other people.
Somebody, a writer, took some time to bear a little bit of their soul to talk about a word.
It’s not clinical.
There’s emotion.
There’s heart.
There’s history.
There’s memory as they’re talking about this word and the place in the environment and the place in their memory and the place in the things that they’ve done with themselves and their interplay with the world.
Yeah.
And it interests me that there are terms that people use in particular parts of the country that aren’t really recorded in standard dictionaries, but they’re familiar to the people who live there.
That’s true.
What were some of the other ones that you listed?
Ribbonfall.
Oh, a ribbonfall.
What is that?
That’s just a waterfall that’s very, very narrow.
Very clearly defined, right?
Yeah.
Not a lot of spray.
Yeah.
And Hourglass Valley is, as you might imagine, a valley that, when you view it from above, is shaped like an hourglass.
That’s fantastic.
I’m going to share some more later in the show.
And the book again?
The book again is Homeground, Language for an American Landscape.
Thank you, Martha.
We’d love to hear your favorite terms for features of the landscape, the world around us, nature, the earth below us, and the sky above us, 877-929-9673.
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