Derecho. The Perfect Word Storm
The mystery and surprise of the unknown word is a delicious gift for you to open.
Note: Don’t like reading? The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡
The thread of narrative. It ties its yarn around greedy eyeballs and pulls sight through the sentence loom. You are a willing participant to this toil, a reader forever stitched into the fabric of the prose, frolicking amongst chapters, devouring long plotlines and intrigues. As you weave your way through, your mind is spun. Sentence, paragraph, chapter, and tome. Subject, object, verb. Protagonist, antagonist, obstacle, conflict, resolution. You are lost in the colors—it is sublime. This rugmaker is an artisan.
You read on and the story carpet grows. With each new revelation of meaning, understanding blooms in this intellectual Spring. Drinking in meaning, context, emotion, and weight, words fly by and your brain processes each one in turn, separating every delicate row in this story’s tapestry and spinning words onto spools. More words, more spools. Brain files them above and below deck in cavernous spool rooms, cataloged for easy reference so that you may consult and perhaps use them yourself one day. “This way, words!” says Brain, watching like a proud parent. “Single file!” The knowledge absorption is progressing nicely.
Until it isn’t.
In the middle of a paragraph, information flowing and data downloading, you are brought to a complete standstill as the mental machinery fumbles its bobbin and a stitch drops.
What is THAT word?
Brain consults the spools. No spool on record. Cleanskin spool. Unmarked. Alert! We have an unknown word! The word stranger just sits there, right in the middle of that sentence, all innocent and serene. No hint of meaning held in its specific placement of letters. You have never met this word before. Your ego briefly puckers in shame before your Curious Universe Mode activates and loosens its belt—it is ready for brain belly expansion.
The unknown word. What a gift. A beautiful, holy, magical gift. Of all the words in all the world, THIS is one that escaped the clutches of your word spool collection endeavors. And here it is—ready to make its introduction.
The word stitch that dropped for me this past week was derecho. I have never in my life heard this word. Never. From what I could gather from the article it was some kind of tree-destroying weather event, but it had to be more than that. It had a weight to it. Derecho seemed so specific, so I did what any word-fearing heathen would do—I called in a big-swinging dictionary.
Derecho: a large fast-moving complex of thunderstorms with powerful straight-line winds that cause widespread destruction
How have I never heard this word before? How do common words slip by us in the night of our lifetimes? And why, when faced with a word stranger, are we so embarrassed to admit we don’t know it? I get the whole “I don’t want to look dumb” thing, but the chance to expand the brain box is always a good thing, no? The surprise of discovering a strange word mid-sentence is one of the last “doesn’t hurt anyone” kinda thrills left in this world. I think we should celebrate it more.
“Hey, everyone! [heads turn] I didn’t know this word! [points at word. Crouches down to look word in face] I say Hooray! to the endless supply of words like you, whom I have yet to meet. Hooray! May we all encounter the dropped stitches of our learning, get out our needles, and darn them right back into the row.”
I’m being overly dramatic, I know. It’s just a word. Derecho. You probably knew it, just as I probably know words you don’t. It’s all luck, circumstance, and exposure. The writer knows a word, the writer uses a word. The reader is given the choice of either skipping over and moving on or looking it up to file away in their own vocabulary. I am not dumb for not knowing derecho, just an incomplete work in progress. Like all of us.
It’s hard to learn entire philosophical concepts. Whole scientific theories. Laws. Even memorizing a monologue is a bear. But learning a single word at a time—the building blocks of all these things—is the easiest thing of all. Word. Definition. Take that word and definition, send it in the direction of the old Brain word shepherd and listen for the spool spin. Next time you encounter the unfamiliar, grab that word stranger by its vowels and consonants and yell into its startled face: “Hooray! What do you mean?”
Read more. Listen more. Submit to not knowing everything. Let the derecho blow through and flatten your forest of darkness. By my watch, it’s time for a Renaissance anyway. It’s impossible to know all the words, but it’s nice to collect the carpets and rugs as they blow by.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
“The farmers settle a piece of land and cultivate it carefully, finding more and more value in it. The cowboys look for new places and are excited by the sheer fact of discovery, and the freedom of being somewhere that not many people have been before.”
Brain Eno waxing poetic on two types of artists. I nabbed this from an Austin Kleon post, and he goes on to explore the concept more here. It’s super interesting to think about, so go read it.
On rotation.
One of those ‘one photo every day’ projects, with a nice morphing animation. This one is 21 years in two minutes. More about the video, here
Via Kottke
This look inside a pencil shop in Tehran needs no captions for translation. It speaks the universal language of the pencil.
Via Messy Nessy Cabinet of Chic Curiosities
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?