I began reading Roger Deakin’s Notes from Walnut Tree Farm because I’m interested in how places shape us.
But I’ve also become interested in Deakin’s diction. My lectionary of baffling words just jumped to another page in my notebook.
Most of the puzzlement is related to place. Deakin lived in a place where cowslips are common wildflowers and a kittiwake is what people call a kind of gull.
He had a whole specialized vocabulary for pollarding trees. It’s an ancient practice in which limbs are removed to prevent storm damage and to encourage certain kinds of growth. In the places Deakin wrote about, people spent time pleaching, intertwining branches of two rows of trees to make an arch.
Pollarding and the related arts are common in England but seem zany to me.
In most cases, we share common experiences underneath superficial differences in language. Deakin’s reports from the pightle sound like the happenings I recall from grandfather’s barnyard.
But the differences in our language are sometimes telling.
Deakin says the people who built his place in the 1500s were graziers, people who grazed livestock. My folks would have said they were ranchers or farmers, focusing on the land, rather than on the activity.
But that difference is important.
Deakin lived on an ancient farm next to a common. The people who built that farmhouse might not have had enough land to graze cattle, but they had grazing rights on the common. The farmhouse and barn were surrounded by a moat. The cattle came home at night, enclosed and protected.
My ancestors’ language focused on farm and ranch because when they talked of land, ownership came to mind. That was the relationship between humans and place.
There are other ways of organizing things — and those different ways are reflected in different kinds of language.
Wittgenstein liked to say that imagining another language was to imagine another way of life. Talking about graziers and ranchers is one small example of what he was talking about.
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