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| Aboard the Resolute, 2019, Antarctic Chile |
Man, the wind.
It's blowing now, as I write this, in the pre-dawn darkness of Center Avenue on Friday. "Blow, blow, thou winter wind," as Shakespeare writes, in As You Like It.
It was blowing half the night. I got up at some point — 2 a.m., 3 a.m. — to the sound of toppling garbage cans. Went downstairs, and looked out the window at the wind-whipped trees. Lots of trees in the old leafy suburban paradise. Particularly over at our windbreak of five very tall, very old California incense cedars. It used to be six evergreen trees, if you recall, until one toppled over in 2018 and nearly killed me. Ever since, I've been waiting for another to go, especially as I walk by with Kitty. All in place, protecting the ghost sugar maple that isn't there anymore.
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| Wind speed is measured with an anemometer |
When we finally went out, Kitty and I had to really lean into what Yeats called the "assault and battery of the wind," gusting to 35 miles an hour, ruffling her fur, tossling the treetops. The bagged newspapers had blown halfway up our driveway.
There was a gale warning in the night. "Mariners should remain in port," the National Weather Service advised, and "secure the vessel for severe conditions." Good general life advice for our present moment, if you ask me.
The house creaked like a wooden ship at sea. Maybe for that reason, I conferred with Bowditch's "American Practical Navigator," which mentions wind nearly 300 times, starting with "true wind," the speed relative to a fixed point, as opposed to your ship, which might be zipping along after it.
I expected Bowditch's definition of "wind" to be enormous, but it was seven succinct words: "air in horizontal motion over the earth," although there were 20 other wind words (not to be confused with "windward," or "the general direction from which the wind blows" among other things).
Which leads us to the word itself. Playing "guess the derivation" of wind, all one has to do is pronounce the word, with its strong blow "whhhhind" to assume it's very old, some kind of Norse onomatopoeia — words that imitate what they describe (pausing to nod respectfully at the Todd Rungren song of the same name, which begins, delightfully, "Onomatopoeia, every time I see ya...")
The Oxford English Dictionary serves up seven plus pages of definitions, tracing wind back to Old Teutonic and pointing out, surprisingly, that for most of its existence, "wind" rhymed with "mind" and "behind" (a pronunciation preserved in "wind your watch") but that changed "in polite speech" in the 18th century explaining, "the short vowel of (wind) is presumably due to the influence of the derivatives windmill, windy , in which is normal." Not exactly following that, but I'm sure it makes sense to somebody.
The OED starts out even more concise than Bowditch's, with three words: 1. Air in motion" and leaps into Beowulf, circa 897: "Holm storme weol, won wio winde."
The 10th definition gets to "'air' or gas in the stomach or intestines" leading to the still common "to break wind" (which led, during World War I usage, "to get the wind up," meaning "to become or make apprehensive," according to John Ayto's Twentieth Century Words, explaining, "Wars are rich sources of joke euphemisms for fear. This one probably comes form the idea of the fart-inducing quality of terror" which, honestly, was not a dynamic I'd considered before or, honestly, care to consider now. The Dictionary of American Slang points out that this is mostly a British military usage, thank God, and adds the delightful, if "prob. synthetic," "wind-wagon.")
By the 14th definition we get the common ""applied to something empty, vain, trifling, or unsubstantial. a. Empty talk, vain or ineffectual speech, mere 'breath,'" a usage going back to 1290. One of the "obvious combinations of "wind" is the worth-reviving "windpuff" and "winddog," which is a fragment of a rainbow. There is "windrake," which is used for "the raking up of windfalls, or the right to do this," pointing at a more literal meaning for "windfall," which first is wood, or fruit, blown down by the wind and ripe for plunder, before it is considered ""A casual or unexpected acquisition or advantage" such as the "windfall apples" that Captain Francis Grose mentions in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.
Oddly, though the OED clasps a perfumed hankie to its lips and hurries past "fuck" without comment, it offers up "windfucker," as a kind of hawk, a kestrel. Given last night, we shouldn't overlook "windshake," which means exactly as it sounds, and the valve in a bellows is a "windsucker."
I probably shouldn't go on too long about this, though there is still fascination aplenty. (What would you call a hole in a building to let the wind in? A "window," of course.)
This has to end somehow — you probably have things to do; I know I do. The wind is a metaphor for oblivion, nowhere. When Bob Dylan sings, "The answer is blowin' in the wind," he is not alluding to a response that you can expect to lay your hands upon, ever.
There was a gale warning in the night. "Mariners should remain in port," the National Weather Service advised, and "secure the vessel for severe conditions." Good general life advice for our present moment, if you ask me.
The house creaked like a wooden ship at sea. Maybe for that reason, I conferred with Bowditch's "American Practical Navigator," which mentions wind nearly 300 times, starting with "true wind," the speed relative to a fixed point, as opposed to your ship, which might be zipping along after it.
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| Wind direction is indicated by a weather vane, like this one atop Rick Telander's barn in Ontonagon, Michigan. |
Which leads us to the word itself. Playing "guess the derivation" of wind, all one has to do is pronounce the word, with its strong blow "whhhhind" to assume it's very old, some kind of Norse onomatopoeia — words that imitate what they describe (pausing to nod respectfully at the Todd Rungren song of the same name, which begins, delightfully, "Onomatopoeia, every time I see ya...")
The Oxford English Dictionary serves up seven plus pages of definitions, tracing wind back to Old Teutonic and pointing out, surprisingly, that for most of its existence, "wind" rhymed with "mind" and "behind" (a pronunciation preserved in "wind your watch") but that changed "in polite speech" in the 18th century explaining, "the short vowel of (wind) is presumably due to the influence of the derivatives windmill, windy , in which is normal." Not exactly following that, but I'm sure it makes sense to somebody.
The OED starts out even more concise than Bowditch's, with three words: 1. Air in motion" and leaps into Beowulf, circa 897: "Holm storme weol, won wio winde."
By the 14th definition we get the common ""applied to something empty, vain, trifling, or unsubstantial. a. Empty talk, vain or ineffectual speech, mere 'breath,'" a usage going back to 1290. One of the "obvious combinations of "wind" is the worth-reviving "windpuff" and "winddog," which is a fragment of a rainbow. There is "windrake," which is used for "the raking up of windfalls, or the right to do this," pointing at a more literal meaning for "windfall," which first is wood, or fruit, blown down by the wind and ripe for plunder, before it is considered ""A casual or unexpected acquisition or advantage" such as the "windfall apples" that Captain Francis Grose mentions in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.
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| A kestrel (Wiki) |
I probably shouldn't go on too long about this, though there is still fascination aplenty. (What would you call a hole in a building to let the wind in? A "window," of course.)
This has to end somehow — you probably have things to do; I know I do. The wind is a metaphor for oblivion, nowhere. When Bob Dylan sings, "The answer is blowin' in the wind," he is not alluding to a response that you can expect to lay your hands upon, ever.
Though my favorite musical evocation is in Warren Zevon's brilliant 12th and final album, "The Wind," composed and recorded after he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, which would kill him at 56. It was a struggle to get the album completed; not only was he dying, but he had seized upon his death sentence as an excuse to relapse into active alcoholism. Zevon uses "wind" as the thing the blows us all away, sooner or later. In the slow, stately "Please Stay" he implores his love to hang around, despite all his problems. "Will you stay with me til the end?" he sings, backed up by Emmylou Harris. "When there's nothing left but you and me and the wind."
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