Shallow Water Dictionary

by John R. Stilgoe

Shallow Water Dictionary is both a celebration of the richness of our vernacular language and a lament on its passing and with it, the passing of the words we need to understand our shallow water regions, once the primary landscape of America and now facing extinction, both physical and linguistic.
This small book is an intriguing and valuable addition to our knowledge of a changing landscape. Literary, etymological, historical, and vernacular investigations of such varied terms as guzzle, creek, and chartreuse, Stilgoes definitions are lyric explanations of words whose original meanings have been eroded by time.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, Reference, Linguistics

48 pages, Hardcover

First published September 28, 1990

About the author

John Stilgoe is an award-winning historian and photographer who is the Robert and Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape at the Visual and Environmental Studies Department of Harvard University, where he has been teaching since 1977. He is also a fellow of the Society of American Historians. He was featured on a Sixty Minutes episode in 2004 entitled "The Eyes Have It."

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tides regularly overflow the marshes, turning the whole place into a vast expanse of sea, Interrupted only by sea-marks and occasional islands. Actual sea-greens lie just barely inland, just beyond the innermost wrack-lines, just beyond the last clumps of beach rose and the perfumeless sea lavender. There, in spring tides and hurricanes, the ocean intrudes, its seasonal swampings creating and maintaining odd wetland ecosystems. If the greenhouse effect proves true and the ocean level rises, then politicians, highway engineers, biologists, real-estate developers, and others will pay much attention to the sea-greens becoming saltmarsh. But who will speak of sea-greens by name?
[43]

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazingly interesting, original, beautifully written book of 43 pages. I would buy it were it not for its $250 price tag, which is very puzzling and irritating. “Landscape — or seascape — that lacks vocabulary cannot be seen, cannot be accurately, usefully visited,” says Stilgoe. The book is full of really beautiful ideas and interesting words — guzzle, gutter, gundalow, flats, spits and many more. It’s fun to read, because learning new words means learning new places, new ideas, new meanings. He laments the disappearance of unabridged dictionaries, and writes a lot about how words and their richness vanish from our language. When they do, a piece of the world vanishes with them. Words are also victims of climate change!

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Landscape - or seascape - that lacks vocabulary cannot be seen, cannot be accurately, usefully visited," Stilgoe writes in Shallow Water Dictionary. This book is an essay on the drift of language. Our language for the shifting waters of the estuary has drifted or disappeared as our attention has drifted from the environment to more human-centered places. Like Barry Lopez's Home Ground, it is a paean to the natural vocabularies now facing extinction from neglect.

[Ben Loory · Rating 4 out of 5]

an essay on lost words and a world that went with them-- the world of the new england marsh. best 43-page book i ever read.

Once adrift on the tide, a sea mark is FLOTSAM, and once stranded by the ebb, it is JETSAM, left on the WRACK LINE. Dictionaries other than this define flotsam as pieces of a wrecked ship or its cargo floating on the sea-- not just anything floating around, say trees washed south from Nova Scotia-- and jetsam as stuff deliberately thrown from a ship in danger of foundering-- jettisoned-- and, Worcester is specific about this, floating under the surface of the water. Jetsam attached to a floating buoy for eventual recovery is ligan, but about that nothing is known along the marshes, so flotsam and jetsam receive attention here, along with wrack. The 1934 Webster is clear that wrack designates any wreckage and all cast-up seaweed, the last usually remaining in a black line along a beach. In the marshes no one uses flotsam and jetsam anywhere near accurately, and wrack designates chiefly stranded seaweed, although the word more frequently identifies a wretchedly maintained boat "going to wrack and ruin." Does a correct term exist for debris, floating or stranded? Is the telephone pole long ago flung across the marsh and into a creek jetsam or wrack or what-- aside from an impediment to navigation?

it sounds like it might drive you crazy, but instead it's a peaceful, meditative read, that opens up an unknown world and makes you sad for an age that lost it.

[Kristin Perkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful rumination on the relationship between language, cultural value, and observable nature, Shallow Water Dictionary meanders through ideas as does a boat through the marsh. The book asks us to acknowledge the importance of specific language if we are to "discriminate" the natural world and identify its value. Using a variety of dictionaries and literature, Stilgoe demonstrates the disappearance (or lack of specific treatment) of words to describe the marshland. These words, he suggests, echo in their absence around a landscape that cannot be fully understood with the austerity of the abridged dictionary. The shifts of language are rendered tragic through Stilgoe's eyes as he lovingly surveys (and gives words to) the shallow water he pulls his boat across. There are moments where Stilgoe almost comes across as crotchety, such as when he derides spellcheck, but this is tempered with an infectious, if quiet, passion of the north-eastern coast. In the last pages of the book, Stilgoe reflects that "if the greenhouse effect proves true" this liminal sea/landscape will follow the words used to describe it into the oblivion. It is a moment that both marks the book as dated and suggests the book's continued relevance. It could certainly be suggested, at least based on the arguments laid out here, that the physical process of global warming is exacerbated by the linguistic processes that continually cull and generate new words—both revealing cultural values and inscribing them.

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of those books that felt like an impulse buy. obviously the marketing dept did a good job making it eye-catching. turns out a year+ later it was required reading for a class. enjoyable stepping into the past. it is hard to tell if it is a story or true (the name aids in it being illusive) but i think this is what Stilgoe intends. encouraging people to look at things differently or to recognize that there are things that are no more.