Wild Blueberry Land in Columbia Falls, Maine
Words are wonderful. Each can be a world of its own, carrying great significance, multiple (sometimes conflicting) meanings and fascinating lineage. Their use – sometimes a single word – can prompt a spectrum of emotions from anger to mirth to confusion.
Confusion and language have gone hand and in hand from the first grunt uttered (possibly 2 million years ago). The desire to enhance understanding and reduce confusion in our early communication . . .
Spoken: “Grunt” (Look out for that dinosaur!)
Heard: “Grunt” (Look at those ripe berries!)
. . . has spurred the human race to great complexity in its communication. Many cultures impart critical information through “words” that are clicked, whistled and, more common to us, subtly created by the nuanced placement of jaw, tongue and lips.
From those sounds, a rich vocabulary of words has emerged to fill the approximately 7,000 living languages known to exist on Earth.
Starting today, the English language will be our focus in this weekly column by Lewiston writer and word lover Jim Witherell, celebrating the uniqueness, origins, wonder and significance of words. As often as possible, we’ll include a connection between Maine and the words we examine.
Next week we’ll begin with a look at a few of the many “weird” words in the English language. It will be a theme we come back to frequently. To start off, why not begin this first column with “weird”?
Germanic in origin, it was used to mean “having the power to control destiny.” We can thank Greek mythology and the three apparitions or “the three fates” (as in, fate = destiny), and then William Shakespeare and his very similar three witches (Weird Sisters) in “Macbeth” for giving rise to “weird” meaning “unearthly.” It has since evolved to also mean odd and unusual.
Weird in Maine? Please forgive this shameless plug, but if you Google “weird,” “wicked” and “Sun Journal” you’ll tap fully into a long-running series by the newspaper focused on the odd and interesting in Maine. A real-life example that is not as shameless: The world’s largest “blueberry” is at Wild Blueberry Land in Columbia Falls, Maine. Weird? Maybe. But wicked fun for sure.
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