Month: October 2009

I am a “word-a-day” addict. I don’t have a word of the day calendar on my desk, but I subscribe to two word a day email services and I keep links to several others. I gave up on expanding my vocabulary when I hit the half-century mark. That was ten years ago. I decided then that if I did not know enough words yet, I had better find the cashier and leave the casino, perhaps because I live in fear of the day that my language processing stack overwrites my control registers. As a computer scientist I know this could happen and the havoc that could ensue.

I know a lot of words. I’ve have been lucky, or foolish, enough to have studied many different subjects in the sixty years I have had the pleasure of dwelling on this green and glorious earth. I’ve been dumb kid, a farmer, a mathematician, an anthropologist, a sinologist, a carpenter, and a computer engineer, roughly in that order. It has been a string of exposures to different concepts, modes of thought, ways of describing things, and faces put to the world, and each one required new vocabulary words. And I passed PhD level examinations in German, Modern Chinese, Classical Chinese and French. Consequently, somewhere deep in the language centers of my brain, many words are stored. Enough to threaten a whole range of touchy control registers leading to all manner of mayhem.

Given this wealth of words, why the obsession with “word-a-day”? Depth is the answer. I don’t look for new words, but I crave better understanding of the words I already know. Here is a collection of links to word-a-day sites.

http://wordsmith.org/words/today.html

The Word A Day site. This site celebrates the English language with words that are not necessarily rare or challenging, but always interesting. The words are organized into weekly themes, and reflect the wide ranging tastes of the site master, Anu Garg, whom I have never met, but revere as a fellow computer professional and lover of language.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/mwwod.pl

A daily word from the venerable American dictionary publishing house that took heat in the early sixties for describing American English as it is used rather than prescribing ideal usage. This decision dismayed those who had deified “Webster’s” as an ultimate moral authority.  The “Did You Know?” sections are a treat for word lovers because the M-W dictionary authors occasionally reveal etymological detail unavailable elsewhere.

http://www.oed.com/cgi/display/wotd

The word of the day from the Oxford English Dictionary is the heavy weight from the definitive historical dictionary of the English language. Of the words of the day, this one I either skip or study at length. Nothing in between. Unparalleled history and depth for word lovers.

http://www.wordcentral.com/buzzword/buzzword.php

The Daily Buzzword is Merriam-Webster’s word a day for eleven to fourteen year olds. Surprisingly, I find this is a very practical site. A working writer has to be cautious when using unfamiliar words. You can easily put off readers by using words they are not familiar with. Rare words become the center of attention and you will be called on the slightest error in their use. The Daily Buzzwords are reminders of good solid words that I want to be the mainstay of my working vocabulary. The Daily Buzzword authors’ word choices are surprisingly useful to a writer for adults. The other word of the day sites are entertainment. This one is for serious work.

According to the calendar, it has been fall for over a month now, but I have not been willing to accede the passing of summer until this week. Wind and rain have stripped the trees and the maples are done with releasing their helicopter seeds. The only green left is the dark green of the firs and hemlocks. There are still a few red and yellow leaves in patches on the maples.

Fall is hard to pinpoint now because we don’t perform many of the fall rituals anymore– no shocking and threshing wheat and oats, no fall silo filing, no hog butchering, no hauling fire wood into the wood shed. I picked the corn two weeks ago and Rebecca froze it. Yesterday, I dug our few potatoes, nothing compared to the acres of potatoes my grandpa dug when he was declared potato king of Whatcom County.

Next weekend, if the weather is not too nasty, I’ll put the mower on the tractor and mow down the corn stalks, then hitch up the rototiller and turn them under.

I hope that all works out. In the old days, we would have fed the cornstalks to the cattle and put their manure on the field. I intend to skip a step and put the cornstalks directly back to the soil with the equipment I have. Dad sold the flail chopper he used to use to clip pasture and send the clippings back to the ground. I would use that now, if I had it. Instead, I’ll use the hay mower, which cuts, but does not chop. If all goes well, the rototiller will chop up the cornstalks and work them into the soil where they will decompose and release their store of nutrients. If all does not go well and the cornstalks just tangle up in the rototiller, I will have learned something.

To accurately imagine the sound of a drag saw, hike into the mountains as far from roads and habitation as you can get, then listen. Eliminate all sound of motor vehicles, airplanes, the hum of rubber tires on paved roads, the drone of factories, and the myriad sounds of human occupation.

Then imagine the steady chug, chug, chug of exploding petroleum in a heavy cast iron single cylinder engine and the shhh, shhh, shhh and ring of the saw slicing away through green wood. Add the clatter of a drive mechanism with a little slack.

Drag saws cross cut big timber. They were replaced sixty or seventy years ago by chainsaws. We had a drag saw on the farm that Grandpa left leaning on a five foot diameter Douglas fir log in the woods the year Dad bought a chainsaw. No one ever fired up the drag saw again. By the time I was old enough to notice it, the drag saw was covered with bright green algae and its wooden rails were beginning to rot. Today, the fir log has rotted down to a little rise on the floor of the woods and the saw is a scarcely recognizable lump of moss-covered iron.

A drag saw blade looked like an old fashioned two man cross cut saw, but heavy enough not to bend when it was pushed through the cut on the forward stroke. Imagine the man on one end of a cross cut saw replaced by a gasoline engine with an eccentric crank like one on the side of a steam locomotive to convert the rotary motion of the engine to the reciprocal motion of the saw blade and you have a drag saw. The single cylinder air-cooled cast iron engine was mounted on a wooden frame that leaned against uncut portion of the log. The saw pivoted downward as it sliced through the log.

Drag saws were impractical for anything but cutting stove wood from logs that only a tall man could see over. Setting up for a cut required stopping the engine, moving the saw, and restarting the engine. Noting the weight and awkward shape of the saw, the altogether cussedness of starting those ancient single cylinder gas engines, and the disappearance of giant trees to cut up for firewood, it does not surprise me in the least that Grandpa left his drag saw to rot the day the chain saw came along.