March 05 2004, 01:01 AM Fishing

It is summer, and the light is lovely and soft in the heat as is simmers down through leaves and leaves, giant green canopies above. Down the embankment of loose dirt we go, stumbling over exposed tree roots, coming up to a sudden stop at the edge of the clear water. As a nod to those who have already told this part of the story, we are laughing, perhaps. The water at our feet is not deep, perhaps to the knee at its most, and it is not wide, perhaps a dozen feet to the low moss of the earth on the other side. Larger rocks are strewn here and there, and small fish can be seen in the water if one holds still.

My question to you then, is this: what do you call this thing, this body of water, trundling by? Brook? Stream? Creek? Crick? Kill? Run? Rill? There are many I know, and I don't know them all. All of those words refer to that lazy slim ribbon of freshwater. There are groups of words like this, often with reference to things both simple and terribly important - that stream out back is only pretty now, but we used to harness the power in the weight of that water to grind our flour, saw wood, work leather. The words are also terribly useful for discovering, selecting, and cataloging English dialect.

(A favorite example: on a snowy night, get some friends and a rear wheel drive boat of a car and head out to the abandoned parking lot to turn the car in ever tighter skidding circles. Growing up, we called this activity 'doing donuts'. In other places in this country, they call it 'doing cookies'. And people in the northern midwest, I cannot fathom, call it 'whipping shitties'.)

Some remarkable results have been tabulated by The Dialect Survey, a furthering of an in-class linguistics experiment by Professor Bert Vaux at Harvard University. Their website collected data from over thirty thousand participants, and breaks it all down both by percentages and (tellingly) by dot plotting on maps. They are not seeking participants now, but they claim another survey is in the works. Their results are worth a look just the same. The questions are worth a look; it is really something how language can mix and flex.

And so, I read today that PETA has asked, in an effort to make the world a more animal friendly place, the city of Fishkill, New York, to change its name.

I do not have any particular complaint with PETA, if only because I believe they believe in what they are doing. There are trade offs and consequences aplenty in the nature of our interaction with animals, and I can understand the impetus. In addition I suppose it gives them something to do. I can also believe that nobody in the organization who was responsible for this is familiar with the particular strains of English dialect that helped birth these names, although that is more of a stretch. I would hope that the weird beauty of English tripped them up, and they made a simple connection without understanding, and that they all had a good laugh when they finally figured out that the city of Fishkill is named after a channel of tumbly water, not death. I would hope that there are not voices in that crowd that continue to agitate for a name change, because they did not know, and so other people will think wrongly, and isn't that reason enough?

I say: hold your tongue.

In addition, changing the name of a city is an astonishing pain in the ass. Pass me a cabinet.