Hi-Dingley-Ho, Mountain Neighbor

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.

A few weeks ago, we talked about the slang from a British research station in Antarctica.

And Grant, you will remember that one of the terms we discussed is the term dingle day.

Right, for a clear day, no clouds, nothing obscuring the view.

Right.

And we heard from Malcolm Dingle, who lives in the city of Worcester, England, and he thinks that the source of this phrase may be his father, Richard Dingell, who is a marine micropaleontologist who worked for the British Antarctic Survey in the 1990s.

And it turns out that in Antarctica, there’s a nunatak named after Richard Dingell.

Now, a nunatak, N-U-N-A-T-A-K, is an Inuit term.

And a nunatak is an isolated mountain peak that’s projecting through surrounding glacial ice.

And Malcolm shared with me what his dad wrote at the time. He said, “That Nunatuck was a place that I landed on from the Navy helicopter and took some samples and fossils. I suppose I was the first person to set foot on it, and a bleak and uninviting place it was too. Nice views, though, to the Southwest.”

And according to the Australian Antarctic Data Center, that’s why that Nunatuck there is called Dingle Nunatuck.

And it seems perfectly plausible to me that on a beautiful sunny day, you would look out and see Dingle Nunatuck and think, “Oh, it’s a Dingle day because I can see the Nunatuck. I can see the Dingle.”

That’s amazing. I love it.

Boom, boom, boom. Neurons firing. Things connecting. This is it.

This is the moment we live for, right? The story unveiled.

I think it is. I can just see. I mean, it’s sort of like in the Pacific Northwest when you say the mountain is out, either for Mount Rainier or Mount Hood.

Right. Yeah, that’s exactly right.

I’d love this. Thank you, Martha. Thanks for making that connection.

We’d love to hear from you. The lines are open. We’re having a dingle day.

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