Words of Place

A Logophile's Take on Seattle

As anyone who reads my newsletter knows, I have an abiding interest in language, particularly the lexis of place. What are the words particular to a location, to the people who inhabit and have inhabited it, who have adapted to it, and who have been informed by living there. I have been fortunate to live in Seattle for most of my life and to have focused the past 25 years on naturalizing myself to the city and its histories. Part of my education has been to seek out the vocabulary of Seattle, to learn the idiosyncratic terms that help make the city unique, special, and enchanting. Today, I thought I’d celebrate that lexicon.

Here’s a list of words and phrases I have gathered over the years. Some are home grown, others have been adapted and adopted in order to provide clarity or elucidation, and a few are used far beyond our fair city; all are part of the story of this place, and, I think, a way to further connect to what makes Seattle Seattle. To borrow, once again, the words of Robert MacFarlane, I hope that the list is convivial, “as the philosopher Ivan Illich intended the word—meaning enriching of life, stimulating to the imagination and ‘encouraging creative relations between people, and people and nature.’”

My list is certainly not thorough and knowing the terms does not make me or anyone else special or more of a Seattleite. It is simply a list that I like and wanted to share. Please note that these terms do not highlight the lexicon of the commercial, industrial, or pop culture worlds; nothing wrong with them but they are not what interests me. As usual, please feel to let me know of other terms or let me know why you disagree or agree with my choices.

Atmospheric river – This lovely and evocative term became popular in the 2020s. Coined by MIT researchers in 1994, it refer to filaments of equatorial vapor that flow northward toward the poles. They chose the term because “some carry as much water as the Amazon.” Prior to the ubiquitous use of atmospheric river, pineapple express was more popular. First used in newspapers in 1986, and still used by some, it indicates that these sky streams of moisture often come across the Pacific Ocean from Hawaii. Alas, none come bearing fruit.

Ballast Island – Trade vessels formerly carried dense, inexpensive ballast, typically rock or brick, which they dumped upon arrival. Much of Seattle’s came from Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, the city’s major trade partner in the last half of the nineteenth century. A popular dumping place was around South Washington Street and Alaskan Way where an island formed. Because of racist city laws, Ballast Island was one of the few places where Native people were tolerated. Subsequent development covered this refuge but it’s still there under pavement and a testimony to the history of intolerance in Seattle.

Boathouse – Back when people couldn’t afford to own a boat for fishing, entrepreneurs opened boathouses on docks around Puget Sound. They often catered to families who could rent a boat and gear and seek advice on where and what to fish. Boathouse culture peaked in the 1950s with more than 150 up and down the Sound. In Seattle, the famous Ray’s Boathouse restaurant began as one such enterprise.

Chinook Jargon – The lingua Cascadia of post-settlement Pacific Northwest, Chinook Jargon grew out of vast trade networks initially between wide spread Indigenous groups and later with European explorers and traders. Most words came from the Chinook language spoken at the mouth of the Columbia River, along with elements of Nootkan and Salish dialects and other Native languages, as well as French and English. Chinook Jargon crops up in place names such as Alki (by and by or in the future), Tumwater (the waterfall), Tukwila (hazelnut), and Skookumchuck (raging water), as well as in words such as potlatch (give) and muckety-muck (muck-a-muck means food).

Convergence Zone - The term first appeared in print in 1969 in an unpublished, internal National Weather Service document but did not become popular until the 1980s. It describes how weather from the Pacific coast splits in two around the Olympic Mountains. One weather wave flows down the Strait of Juan de Fuca and one through the Chehalis Gap, a glacial outwash-carved lowland between the Olympics to the north and the Willapa Hills to the south. The uniting of the twained fronts, which often occurs around Everett, results in increased precipitation, both liquid and solid. Depending on the weather vagaries, the convergence zone can move up and down the Sound.

Duwamish - Duwamish refers to people of the inside place, or those who lived up what have been named the Duwamish, Cedar, and Black Rivers. As with other words from Lushootseed, the English version approximates the original word, dxʷdəwʔabš. Absh, or ish, means people. Today, the Duwamish continue their social, cultural, and economic life through their Longhouse, near the mouth of the river.

Juan de Fuca – In 1596, Greek mariner Apostolos Valerianos told English merchant Michael Lok that he had sailed north from Mexico to a “broad Inlet of Sea” between 47 and 48 degrees latitude. Valerianos, who is better known as Juan de Fuca, sailed, or so he claimed, east for more than twenty days, finding a productive land and valuable minerals. He thought he had discovered the Straits of Anian, or the legendary Northwest Passage. He didn’t, but his name remains; most historians doubt that Juan de Fuca ever made it to his eponymous strait. No clue about whether he liked cigars.

Not that I think anyone should smoke a cigar, but I was tickled by this image.

The Mountain – Who knows how long people have been calling the giant peak in the Cascades “The Mountain?” I suspect it, or a Native variant (təqʷuʔbəʔ, pronounced Tahoma or Tacoma, the Lushootseed word for what most people call Mt. Rainier, means the mother of all waters) dates back forever. The great summit certainly stands out, high above the multitude of lower peaks, and when people first arrived here, The Mountain was about a 1,000 feet higher; the summit blew off in a cataclysmic eruption, 5,700 years ago. Read through the local newspapers and their periodic “how do you know you’re a Seattleite” columns and the use of The Mountain always certifies a local, or so say the pundits. Certainly, locals love The Mountain, plus, the phrase has led to one of Seattle’s few weather-specific terms, The Mountain Is Out.

Mosquito Fleet – The term has been around since the Revolutionary War to refer to small, fast vessels but in our neck of the woods it referenced the hundreds of steamers that plied Puget Sound from the 1870s to the 1920s. Typically pointy-ended, flat bottomed, propeller driven, steam powered, and made of wood, the boats were a combination of public transportation, UPS truck, post office, and general store. By allowing people to live anywhere along the waterway and stay connected to the larger population centers, the Mosquito Fleet vessels were essential to creating the community of Puget Sound.

Prism lights – Embedded in the sidewalks of Pioneer Square are small pieces of glass, typically square on top with a wedge or prism base below grade. Builders used these prism, or vault, lights, to illuminate the spaces under the sidewalks, which had been created when the city raised streets after the Great Fire of 1889. Manganese dioxide in the glass, which had long been used to help make glass colorless, creates the color because it turns purple under long term exposure to ultraviolet light. In 2011, Seattle University professor Marie Wong helped organize a team to study and report on the lights. They counted 27,417 prisms, of which 12,837 were completely intact. Prism lights are found in cities around the world.

Condition of prism lights from Marie Wong’s Seattle Prism Light Reconnaissance Study, 2011.

Ravine – Long ago in neighborhood nearby, my friends and I referred to the wooded area close to our homes as The Ravine. Curiously, now that I look back on it, it wasn’t really a ravine, or narrow, steep-sided valley and, not that we cared, it had an official name, Interlaken Park. Seattle is rife with ravines, most without formal names. We owe this abundance to the last Ice Age and the steep hills, relatively soft sediments, high precipitation, and numerous seeps. Ravine is borrowed from the French for a torrent of water. Other names for a similar feature you might hear elsewhere include gulch, arroyo, gorge, gully, and cañada.

Regrade – No other city in the United States has Regrades like Seattle. Most do have what I call small “r” regrades, where undulating streets were cut and filled to become level, but Seattle’s capital “R” Regrades are unprecedented. These involved removing entire hills or ridges, sometimes lowering the landscape by more than 100 feet. There were three areas of this terra reforming. Least known is the Dearborn Street Regrade (1909-1912). The single biggest in terms of surface area was the Jackson Street Regrade (1907-1909). And, the most famous are the Denny Hill Regrades, five of which occurred: 1897, 1903, 1907, 1908-1911, and 1928-1930. All of the Regrades but the last used hydraulic cannons to wash away the hills. The final Denny project used steam and electric shovels.

And you wonder why anyone would want to be mayor. If you get the job, you might have the honor of moving the last shovel of the Denny Regrade.

Salish – The word refers to both a family of languages and to ethnically related people, who speak the language. Salish came into English from the Bitterroot Salish people of Montana, who called themselves séliš, or the people. More than two dozen distinct languages and many dialects comprise the family, which is separated into Coastal Salish (Vancouver Island to Northwest Oregon) and Interior Salish, stretching to eastern Montana.

Ship Canal – The Montlake Cut and the Fremont Cut comprise what is known as the Lake Washington Ship Canal. Chinese workers employed by the Wa Chong Company completed the first cuts linking Lake Washington and Lake Union and Puget Sound in 1885. In 1901, the cut between Lake Union and Salmon Bay was expanded into what was known as the Government Canal. Workers completed the modern Ship Canal in 1916; it opened officially on July 4, 1917, 63 years to the day after early settler Thomas Mercer proposed the idea of connecting salt water and fresh water.

Skid Road – In Murray Morgan’s classic tale of the city, Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle, he wrote: “The Skid Road: the place of dead dreams.” The term originated in loggers’ camps in reference to logs being skidded down on mud or corduroy roads to mills. It first appears in Seattle in the 1850s for Henry Yesler’s skid road that brought logs down what was Mill Street—now Yesler Way—to his waterfront mill. Like the street name, Skid Road changed, becoming Skid Row and a synonym for less-than-desirable parts of town. Whether the term originated in Seattle or Vancouver or elsewhere still gets historians hot under their tweed jackets.

Sound – Cartographers do not have a specific definition for a sound, though some have favored its use for a channel that can easily be sounded. British explorer George Vancouver gave us the name when he honored his lieutenant Peter Puget in May 1792 with Puget’s Sound. George could also have used gulf or bay for the waterway. Sound comes from both Old English sund, meaning water or sea, and Old Norse, sund, meaning swimming or strait. It seems to be a place name primarily used by the British, including writers such as John Milton and Jonathan Swift.

Sunbreak – A splendid turn of word for a place like Seattle, where clouds can block the sun for weeks at at time, sunbreak first appeared in 1826 in the book length poem, Dartmoor, written by Noel Thomas Carrington. “[T]he few bright sun-breaks, that have cheer'd My toilsome pilgrimage!" Carrington wasn’t actually referencing true sun-breaks, or bursts of sunshine, but used the term as a metaphor for hope and uplift, still true for today’s residents of Seattle who rely on these moments of light in the dark of winter. Another fine, but seldom used, term is filtered sunshine, incorporated into a 1924 pamphlet Chamber of Commerce pamphlet as "best for all, and vital to the development of the most energetic peoples." And, we are so vital in Seattle.

Whulge – The oldest place name we have, x̌ʷəlč—often written in English as whulge—means salt water, and is the Lushootseed word for Puget Sound. I have been told that it is derived from the noise waves make as they come up on the beach. To Native people, who had few names for large geographic features, x̌ʷəlč is more of a concept than a defined location, more of a way to delineate a relationship to place for the waterway’s Coast Salish people, as in “We are of the salt water.”

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A moment of sadness to report the death of Estella Leopold, one of the great scientists to grace Seattle. I was lucky to meet her many years ago and to write a biography of her for HistoryLink. The youngest child of Aldo Leopold, Estella was a wonderful person, always supportive and inquisitive, one who fought to defend green spaces, and still engaged her work well into her 80s. She will be missed by many.