As someone who enjoys browsing through a bookstore or through the morning's blogs, I appreciated your ranging across the Pacific Northwest in pursuit and appreciation of landscape and language. Your stroll to Cascade Pass, whilst omitting mention the switchbacks that got you there, reminded me of hikes and strolls in high places. As someone who delights in bringing up the rear of a hiking outing, like ours yesterday to Tiffany Mountain, I greatly appreciated your appreciation for the strolling side of the animal kingdom.
Also being a fan of Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks, I took your digressions to allow me a similar detour to yours and in a moment of www.wandering, I left your blog just now to browse into the VisualThesaurus https://www.visualthesaurus.com/ in search of another word for browse, and was thrilled by the explosion of linguistic paths that opened up when considering "range" as a more geologically associated word and synonym for stroll.
(And if VT is new to you, I encourage you to take a moment sometime to stroll through that online thesaurus' fields of shifting synonyms and interwoven webs of meaning.)
My book Walking Washington's History has self-guided history walking tours of ten cities in Washington: Seattle, Spokane, Bellevue, Vancouver, Everett, Bellingham, Walla Walla, Olympia, Tacoma, and Yakima. Guess they're not clickable, though.
As one who loves to hike, and also has walked many pilgrim paths, I love the word saunter, and have learned that it may come from à la sainte terre, which means going to the Holy Land. I googled on the term, and from the internet Online Etymology Dictionary comes this bit of informtion.
This is the etymology given by Samuel Johnson in his great dictionary (1755):
To SAUNTER v.n. [aller à la sainte terre, from idle people who roved about the country, and asked charity under pretence of going à la sainte terre, to the holy land, or sans terre, as having no settled home].
Apparently it appears in English dictionaries from the 1680s and '90s, including the 1699 canting crew dictionary, Miege's English dictionary of French, and Nathan Bailey's dictionary (1724) has an abbreviated version of the same etymology. Online Etymology Dictionary wonders if the story comes from French, but didn't track it down.
As someone who enjoys browsing through a bookstore or through the morning's blogs, I appreciated your ranging across the Pacific Northwest in pursuit and appreciation of landscape and language. Your stroll to Cascade Pass, whilst omitting mention the switchbacks that got you there, reminded me of hikes and strolls in high places. As someone who delights in bringing up the rear of a hiking outing, like ours yesterday to Tiffany Mountain, I greatly appreciated your appreciation for the strolling side of the animal kingdom.
Also being a fan of Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks, I took your digressions to allow me a similar detour to yours and in a moment of www.wandering, I left your blog just now to browse into the VisualThesaurus https://www.visualthesaurus.com/ in search of another word for browse, and was thrilled by the explosion of linguistic paths that opened up when considering "range" as a more geologically associated word and synonym for stroll.
(And if VT is new to you, I encourage you to take a moment sometime to stroll through that online thesaurus' fields of shifting synonyms and interwoven webs of meaning.)
Loved this article.... thanks for the encouragement to wander... PNW has more than it's share of beauty!
My book Walking Washington's History has self-guided history walking tours of ten cities in Washington: Seattle, Spokane, Bellevue, Vancouver, Everett, Bellingham, Walla Walla, Olympia, Tacoma, and Yakima. Guess they're not clickable, though.
As one who loves to hike, and also has walked many pilgrim paths, I love the word saunter, and have learned that it may come from à la sainte terre, which means going to the Holy Land. I googled on the term, and from the internet Online Etymology Dictionary comes this bit of informtion.
This is the etymology given by Samuel Johnson in his great dictionary (1755):
To SAUNTER v.n. [aller à la sainte terre, from idle people who roved about the country, and asked charity under pretence of going à la sainte terre, to the holy land, or sans terre, as having no settled home].
Apparently it appears in English dictionaries from the 1680s and '90s, including the 1699 canting crew dictionary, Miege's English dictionary of French, and Nathan Bailey's dictionary (1724) has an abbreviated version of the same etymology. Online Etymology Dictionary wonders if the story comes from French, but didn't track it down.
“From the dew soaked hedge crawls a creep caterpillar…” lyric from Kinks song Autumn Almanac