Word of the Day
pindan
noun
semiarid country; scrubland.
More about pindan
Pindan “semiarid country” is an adaptation of the word bindan in the Bardi language. Bardi is an endangered language spoken in Western Australia’s northern Kimberley region, which borders the Indian Ocean and the Timor Sea. Unlike most aboriginal languages of Australia, which belong to the Pama-Nyungan family (as we learned in the Word of the Day podcast about yakka), Bardi belongs to the Nyulnyulan family, all languages of which are spoken in the same area of what is now Western Australia. In North America, the Pacific coast hosts the most linguistic diversity, with over 20 unrelated Indigenous language families and language isolates spoken from Juneau to San Diego; in Australia, a similar phenomenon exists on the continent’s northern shore, which more than a dozen discrete language families call home. Pindan was first recorded in English in the early 1930s.
how is pindan used?
Our ideals of nature include striking features of landscape: mountains and hills, flowing rivers, tall trees, perhaps even hedgerows. The pindan has none of these. It is flat and densely vegetated, though burnt fairly regularly. For people used to navigating by hills and valleys, it is easy to get lost in …. The qualities of the pindan are subtle, and must be lived with, learnt and understood. They reveal themselves gradually, to those who make an effort to find them. And they are known intimately by the people who truly belong there.
In the south-western Kimberley, wide sandy plains are covered by a low open woodland and tall shrubland known as pindan, in which wattles are dominant, with a grassy understorey. Passing southwards, as the rainfall diminishes there is a corresponding fall in the lushness and variety of the vegetation. To the south-west the transition is to the rugged Pilbara, and to the south the desert.
sylvan
adjective
consisting of or abounding in woods or trees; wooded; woody.
More about sylvan
Sylvan “consisting of or abounding in woods or trees” derives from Latin sylvānus, a variant of silvānus “of or relating to the forest,” from silva “forest” and the adjectival suffix -ānus. Though silva is spelled with an i, sylvan and its relatives, such as the place names Pennsylvania and Transylvania as well as the given names Sylvester and Sylvia, contain the letter y. There are two reasons for this shift: Ancient Greek influence and the lack of spelling consistency during the Medieval Latin period. Ancient Greek contains two words for “wood”—hȳ́lē and xýlon—that bear a passing resemblance to Latin silva, and as the letters i and y became interchangeable in Latin during the Middle Ages, it was rather easy for the variant spelling sylva to emerge. Sylvan was first recorded in English circa 1560.
how is sylvan used?
Over time North America’s forests became a dense patchwork of different sylvan communities, each characterized by a unique topography and climate. As a whole, the deciduous forest was home to many different tree species—oaks, beeches, maples, basswoods, hickories, chestnut, ashes, elms, birches and poplars—but different types of trees predominated in different regions.
It’s the first day of our four-day trek through the valley, and already the undergrowth is so thick we can barely squeeze through. Matt disappears into the sylvan maze. We’re not on a trail. There is no trail. Beyond the thicket we come upon what we’ve taken to calling a “gangplank”—a downed tree so enormous it creates an elevated walkway through the forest. We clamber atop the behemoth and step carefully along its moss-slick back.
bibliophile
noun
a person who loves or collects books, especially as examples of fine or unusual printing, binding, or the like.
More about bibliophile
Bibliophile “a person who loves or collects books” is a compound of the combining forms biblio- “book” and -phile “lover.” The form biblio- is adapted from Ancient Greek biblíon “papyrus roll, strip of papyrus,” which is the namesake of Býblos, the Greek name for the Phoenician seaport of Gebal (or Gubal), where papyrus was once manufactured and exported. Byblos still exists today in modern Lebanon, albeit with the name Jbeil (standard Arabic Jubayl). One theory about the origin of the name Býblos is that it resulted from Ancient Greek traders’ misinterpretation of the name Gebal, but some linguists argue that these two names are unrelated and that Býblos is of pre-Greek origin. Though books have long been a primary mode for recording and transmitting information, the origin of the Ancient Greek word for “book” is uncertain—how ironic! Bibliophile was first recorded in English circa 1820.
how is bibliophile used?
People have always collected things. Whether a vestige of our hunter-gatherer days, a need to forge order amid chaos, or a simple desire to have and to hold, the urge to possess is a hallmark of the human psyche …. In 1869 the bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillipps said he needed “to have one copy of every book in the world.” His final tally (50,000 books, perhaps 100,000 manuscripts) wasn’t bad. Or close.
In the imaginary encounter that the narrator has in Baghdad with a strange character who’s a bookseller in the famed al-Mutanabi Street in downtown Baghdad (where old, rare and new books are sold) he meets this strange bibliophile who has this project of documenting everything that the war destroys minute-by-minute—and not just human beings, but objects and trees and animals and so on and so forth. And that’s the kernel of the book.