New England stone walls
[NOTE: Yesterday I noticed a discussion in the open thread about stone walls in New England and elsewhere. I thought I’d link to a post I wrote about stone walls, but – as sometimes happens – I discovered there was no such post published and that I was thinking about a draft I wrote many years ago and never published. So perhaps the time has come for it to see the light of day.]
In rural (or even semi-rural) New England the stone walls are just about everywhere:
Walk into a patch of forest in New England, and chances are you will—almost literally—stumble across a stone wall. Thigh-high, perhaps, it is cobbled together with stones of various shapes and sizes, with splotches of lichen and spongy moss instead of mortar. Most of the stones are what are called “two-handers”—light enough to lift, but not with just one hand. The wall winds down a hill and out of sight. According to Robert Thorson, a landscape geologist at University of Connecticut, these walls are “damn near everywhere” in the forests of rural New England.
He estimates that there are more than 100,000 miles of old, disused stone walls out there, or enough to circle the globe four times.
I can well believe it.
When I first moved to New England eons ago, I was puzzled by the ubiquity of those stone walls in the forests. I very quickly learned that the forests are second growth and the walls were built when the land was mostly cleared fields (the rocks themselves were a by-product of clearing the once-glaciated land).
By the middle of the 19th century, New England was over 70 percent deforested by settlers, a rolling landscape of smallholdings as far as the eye could see. But by the end of the century, industrialization and large-scale farms led to thousands of fields being abandoned, to begin a slow process of reforestation.
What actually happened was that the midwest opened up, and farming was so very much better there that farmers moved away. There are still plenty of farms in New England, but they’re small.
More here:
The origins of New England’s wall stones date back to between about 30,000 and 15,000 years ago, when the Laurentide ice sheet—a remnant of which still exists in the Barnes Ice Cap on central Baffin Island—made its way southward from central Canada and then began retreating. “It stripped away the last of the ancient soils,” writes Thorson in “Stone by Stone,” “scouring the land down to its bedrock, lifting up billions of stone slabs and scattering them across the region.”
As the ice sheet melted and receded, it left behind deposits of unsorted material ranging in size from clay to massive boulders chiseled from the slate, schist, granite and gneiss bedrock of northern New England and Canada. The bucolic rolling hills and meadows of New England are formed of rich glacial soil called lodgment till—up to 60 meters thick—that was “almost single-handedly responsible for the success of the agricultural economy in New England,” Thorson says. A thinner, looser layer of rocks and sand called ablation, or “melt out” till was left above the lodgment till. Most stone walls are composed of stones from melt-out till, which were “abundant, large, angular and easy to carry,” Thorson says, compared to the smaller, more rounded stones from the deeper lodgment till.
Although New England’s stone walls are popularly associated with the Colonial era, there weren’t actually many rocks lying around in the soil at that time. As evidence, Thorson cites Swedish botanist Peter Kalm, who toured New England in the mid-1700s. In his “Travels in North America,” Kalm observed of its forest soils, “[T]he Europeans coming to America found a rich, fine soil before them, lying loose between the trees as the best in a garden. They had nothing to do but to cut down the wood, put it up in heaps, and to clear the dead leaves away.”
Likewise, Colonial-era books on farming, encyclopedias and recorded observations do not mention stone walls, Thorson notes. Instead of stone walls, Colonial farmers used rail and zig-zag fences made of wood—far more abundant at the time than stone—to pen animals. It wasn’t until the latter half of the 18th century that early stone walls were first widely constructed in New England. Even then, other than in long-farmed interior areas such as Concord, Mass., the stone was typically quarried or taken from slopes rather than from fields.
The region’s stones lay deep in the ground, buried under thousands of years’ worth of rich composted soil and old-growth forests, just waiting to be freed by pioneers clear-cutting New England’s forests—a process that reached its peak across most of New England between 1830 and 1880…
I hadn’t known that. I’d assumed the stones had been there for the earliest of settlers from Europe. But the stones were actually products of forest clearing, and it got worse in a snowball effect:
Widespread deforestation exposed New England’s soils to winter cold—scientists estimate winter was 1 to 1.5 degrees Celsius colder on average during the Little Ice Age than it is today—causing them to freeze deeper than they had before. This accelerated frost heaving, and gradually lifted billions of stones up through the layers of soil toward the surface.
These stones weren’t conducive to farming, so, aided by their oxen, farmers hauled the stones to the outer edges of pastures and tillage lands, typically unceremoniously dumping them in piles that delineated their fields from the forest. (Some of these so-called “dumped walls” would later be relaid more intentionally when improved tools and equipment made rebuilding easier.) In the early days, artistry in stone wall building had to wait. The first priority was survival, which meant clearing land to grow crops and raise livestock.
The settlers were not unfamiliar with the process, either, because “New England” turns out to be aptly named:
…[R]ock in New England is similar to rock in England and Scotland. England and New England have similar natural landscapes because both lands have a similar geologic history. Millions of years ago, England and New England were formed within the same mountain range near the center of Pangaea. So, he says, “the similar fieldstones on opposite sides of the Atlantic were created practically within the same foundry.”
But there was one important difference between these New World and Old World stones: Britain had long been deforested, with its subterranean stones brought to the surface, so its stone walls had been constructed hundreds, if not thousands, of years earlier.
Much much more at the link.
And then – of course – there’s Robert Frost on the subject.
I’ll close with a scene from one of my favorite movies, Jan Troell’s “The Emigrants.” Warning: this scene is not a cheerer-upper. The film is set in Sweden during the mid-1800s, and this clip illustrates one of the many many reasons this family and many others emigrated to Minnesota:
I have heard this fact, and believe it is correct; There are now more trees in the United States than when Columbus* discovered the New World.
*Call back to yesterday’s discussion.
To get a fuller feel for the area, one should look to the books of Eric Sloane.
Once you’re done planting a season, you till up the field. Each year there is some loss of soil, so you plow a little deeper each year. And every year you find rocks, you can ask any farmer around here. You clear those out to the nearest edge of field.
Grew up in New England so probably heard it on a field trip or some such (an actual education.) But I do see it every year here in Indiana.
Speaking of which, beautiful country side, but the larger cities are typical Democrat “para-dices.”
One of my brothers went to a conference in Boston. He took along my SIL and their children. The idea was ‘road trip’ when he was done with his conference.
When I talked with one of my nieces she said “All Daddy (my brother) would say about New England was that their only natural resource seems to be stone.”
Knowing my brother and his sense of humor … it’s both funny and true at the same time.
Same ubiquitous stone walls in parts of the old Yugoslavia, Bosnia or Serbia if I remember correctly. Scraping an existence out of places like that would be a nightmare.
“There are now more trees in the United States than when Columbus* discovered the New World.”
OMG! you mean the US is actually doing “carbon sequestering”? Who knew we were so advanced in our climate change fight? 😉
Had to do some digging a week or so ago in the backyard. I went out with the mindset of hitting a rock on every attempt to put the shovel in…I was so surprised when I had the hole dug and not a single damn rock. Another advantage of Florida over New England. Every spring in CT I would have to remove at least 4-5, 8-12″ rocks from the yard that had “grown” over the winter from the soil freezing and pushing them up.
Not just for walls around fields. During my teenage years this place was just a couple blocks away and since one side of my family was SDA I went there many times just to look around. I was a very beautiful building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phelps_Sanitarium
I never knew the stone walls were not colonial. Interesting!
My experience in both New England and Michigan lead to the rather obvious conclusion that some glaciated areas have an abundance of rocks while others have mostly sand and others have a combination. When I asked my neighbors the geologists they said it varied according to the activity of the glaciers. What they accumulated, how fast they moved and how thick they were.
Here on Nantucket we’ve got a terminal moraine geology without a lot of clay. Plenty of field stone sized rocks and lots of sand. If you didn’t know, clay soils are pulverized rock and don’t greatly accumulate until the glaciers weigh enough.
The early settlers would have first farmed the rich bottom lands…probably already being farmed by the various tribes. Once that land was occupied then the higher ground which had been cleared for timber would be farmed…after most of the rocks had been piled on the property lines.
I wonder how long it took for all the bottom land to be utilized. Because I find it hard to believe that 40 – 60 pound rocks are moved up out of the soil by a freeze thaw cycle. Those rocks were already near or at the surface and were dug out and moved by the farmers.
And another consideration is the invasive specie known as the earthworm. They have greatly sped up the forest floor decomposition cycle.
Neo’s source says, “Britain had long been deforested, with its subterranean stones brought to the surface, so its stone walls had been constructed hundreds, if not thousands, of years earlier.”
Naturally that made me think of the 73-mile-long stone wall across northern England, namely Hadrian’s Wall. Begun by the emperor around 122 AD, the construction of the wall required the work of three full-strength Roman legions, or about 15,000 soldiers, over a period of six years. Some historians think that in addition to providing a defensive barrier against the Scottish tribes to the north, building the wall kept the legionaries too busy to become bored (there wasn’t much to do for amusement in northern England) and stir up trouble. Much of the wall was taken apart in the eighteenth century, when local farmers began taking stones from the wall to build their own stone walls around their farms.
Here’s a BBC documentary on Hadrian’s Wall; the discussion of Hadrian’s need to keep the legionaries too busy to mutiny occurs around 52:20.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGsxbFTf4Vg&ab_channel=HistoryFiles
I can not think of stone walls without thinking about “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”.
Yawrate —
I find it hard to believe that 40 – 60 pound rocks are moved up out of the soil by a freeze thaw cycle
Well, freeze-thaw can lift and rupture driveways, decks, and whole foundations, so…
It’s why in New England your foundations have to be four feet deep, and ours in Seattle only have to be one foot deep.
Many stone walls in the woods here in northern New England also have accompanying old trees which have many more branches than the younger trees, testimony to their early growth at the edge of fields. That they still survive in a competitive forest environment is pretty remarkable.
Many walls were constructed along surveyed boundaries which used compass readings, so they are a record of where magnetic north was back then which can be compared to current readings to calculate magnetic drift. This article goes into more detail on that topic: https://theconversation.com/old-stone-walls-record-the-changing-location-of-magnetic-north-112827
The effort expended to clear the forests, burn the stumps, then remove the stones, all by small farm owners with little resources, and evidenced by the walls, gives me pause. I can imagine how they would feel if they could see the land over which they toiled so hard now reclaimed forest…
Bryan,
I’ve lived most of my life in Michigan which was very glaciated and have never observed rocks appearing from beneath the ground. And it seems like whenever I dig more than 4 or 5 inches into the soil I find a rock. My geology friends call our soils glacial till.
My experience on Nantucket is the same. Stones push up but rocks remain hidden until uncovered with a shovel.
Concrete is different in that it is already on the surface.
Yawrate —
Have we run aground on a regionalism?
“Stones push up but rocks remain hidden until uncovered with a shovel.”
“Stones” and “rocks” are synonyms, aren’t they?
I found this youtube video informative with respect to the history of the now forested areas of New England. He discusses, to some extent, the stone walls, but more so the economic factors that led to conversion and later abandonment of farming in the region, along with interesting tips on what shaped some of the trees and surface features there. This is the first of 3 videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcLQz-oR6sw&list=PLEaZeqxo7YRLKAKzTSZ8B5ULkHrQHSCvP&index=3&ab_channel=NewEnglandForests
Stones grow on our North Carolina lot (clay soil). We’ve got little stone walls built around gardens all over our one acre.
Colonial-era books on farming, encyclopedias and recorded observations do not mention stone walls, Thorson notes. Instead of stone walls, Colonial farmers used rail and zig-zag fences made of wood—far more abundant at the time than stone—to pen animals. It wasn’t until the latter half of the 18th century that early stone walls were first widely constructed in New England.
Since Independence wasn’t until 1776 I rather think that “latter half of the 18th century” IS Colonial times. Sure it’s the back half of it. But by population it’s the majority: In 1750 only one million lived in the colonies and by 1780 there were almost 3 million. In 1700 there were only about 1/4 million.
So I think it’s misleading to say they “weren’t Colonial”.
My folks owned property in a small Berkshire Mass. town named Becket for many years. I have been a New Yorker all my life (NYC and then Long Island), and traveling to this rural area and wondering about the stone walls was fascinating: who built them and when, and why. There were never any clear answers. Everyone had their guess. Even the literature that is available is unsettled. The information you provided here is quite clarifying. It is rational and I like it.
physicsguy @ 2:22pm,
The first time I went to plant a tree in Florida I was astounded. A task that would have taken hours back home was done in about 20 minutes. And the speed at which all flora grows. The trick to landscaping and gardening in Florida is keeping things from growing out of control and cutting things back, rather than coaxing them to grow. (Same also for insects, lizards, snakes and other critters, unfortunately.)
I live in a small town in the Connecticut River Valley just south of Hartford, in an area called “The Great Meadows.” The soil is fantastic–fertile, loamy, no rocks. And no stone walls. I have dug many a post-hole and have seldom encountered any rocks.
I attended a lecture a couple of years ago by Thorson. He explained that there is a ridge about 15 miles south of Hartford, through which the glacier, and then the river, cut a narrow channel; the glaciers would repeatedly fetch up against the ridge, and retreat leaving deep till. Because of the “bathtub effect” the river didn’t, and doesn’t, wash the till out to the sea.
There are miles of meadows along the river which flood every spring and are undeveloped; they are very fertile and are farmed, and there are great, wide open fields where sod is grown commercially (A wonderful place to take the kids and dogs for a run).
My wife is an avid gardener. We are considering moving south, but have yet to find anywhere with soil that even remotely approaches what we have here.
Thorson is rather full of himself and has a strong tendency to get lefty-political. When he sticks to geology he’s very good, though.
The trick to landscaping and gardening in Florida is keeping things from growing out of control and cutting things back…
Rufus T. Firefly:
Back in my psychedelic days, a friend and I were walking about our Florida hometown suitably expanded. It was a day trip, which I preferred because the night ones could get a bit weird, and the greenery all around us was a huge palpable presence.
“Life abounding,” my friend said. “Life abounding.”
I do miss the South.
Ah Rufus… The Tropics!
I still remember the first time I saw a proper jungle hillside: Not just trees growing cheek by jowl, but trees growing through trees, trees growing *on* trees, and vines and other green stuff growing on top all of the above. And the wall of sound from more than enough bugs to provide nutritious school lunches the young leaders of tomorrow.
I’m not that widely travelled in Australia… never did take to the place… but There do seem to be a lot of stone walls in Southern New South Wales and also in parts of Rural Victoria just back of the Great Ocean Road. Much of this was sheep farming country in the early days so there wasn’t much need to clear stones for the plough. Could have been that abundant convict labour lent itself to building stone walls with freely available material thanks to the local geology.
In South-East Queensland, only the Squatter Aristocracy built in stone. There are some grand palatial homesteads from those days, but everyone else built in timber. The Squatocracy had no need of fences. Fences were for Little People. Sadly no real Range Wars — the Australians always were deep down quite temperate and well-behaved good doggies — as the past year+ has reminded us.
@geoffb:
Re the Phelps Sanitarium and its competing Battle Creek Sanitarium from the Glory Days of Hands Above the Sheets and eat your Cornflakes Third Great Awakening Crunchy Granola Nuttiness, there’s this Antipodean Echo:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitarium_Health_and_Wellbeing_Company
Ironic really that a good part of the Third Great Awakening coalesced around the theme of Health and Wellness.. and our current hallucinating high priests and priestesses are on a similar bent during our Great Awokening.
Mann, in his “1491” has some figures for the land which went out of agriculture and into forest at the advent of the European diseases. Speculates the rapid CO2 sequestration may have caused or exacerbated the Little Ice Age.
Boatbuilder, I have family in Norwich. Is this in the area you mention?
Argument from incredulity is sometimes a matter of intuitive views of, say, probability. As in EDKH. Still, another degree or two F leading to mass frost heave is hard to picture. Best answer so far, but…..it can move the top most but what happens below the new frost line?
Richard Aubrey–Norwich is the next major river valley eastward–the Thames*. Very nice but no meadow and lots and of rocks. Lots of stone walls, too.
*Pronounced like it is spelled–not like that asshole King George with the speech impediment pronounced it.
Surely there are here those old enough to remember the proverb; “Good fences make good neighbors”.
Zaphod:
Apparently Snopes has busted the claim, that John Kellog invented corn flakes as part of an anti-masturbation campaign, as “mostly false.”
However, in his time Kellogg plowed his cornflakes money into the eugenics movement and he also backed a national nutrition program with the “whole population under government supervision.”
https://www.mashed.com/151372/the-untold-truth-of-cheerios/
Clearly John Kellog was born in the wrong century.
@boatbuilder:Pronounced like it is spelled
No one ever pronounced the “h” in the English Thames. The Britons called it Tamesas, the Romans Tamesis, Magna Carta called it Tamesia.
There is a river called “Thame” which is a tributary of the Thames and perhaps that’s where the “h” came from, but King George if he said “Tems” was pronouncing it as the English had for 500 years before he got there.
Incidentally if George had been the source, a heavy German accent rather than a speech impediment seems more likely to me…
Neo should be interested in the Oxfordshire town of Thame. Robin Gibb lived there.
Got a friend in the Wealth Management business who has his little estate just outside Thame. The stories he tells me about old money and stealth wealth in the area are very interesting. Partly because of heritage preserving planning rules and partly because the seriously rich didn’t get rich by being complete idiots about their fellow man and what might be coming down the pike, it turns out that there’s a lot of subterranean work — e.g. underground pools and parking garages, stuff built into hillsides etc. Contractors with expertise in this kind of work have done very well. But driving around, all that you see from the roads is Timeless Merrie England.
@Mick 6:17 pm – I was going to suggest these videos. He is brilliant, and puts so many different natural oddities into their rightful perspective, with his forensic analysis of the origins of these artifact features. Highly recommended viewing.
Surely there are here those old enough to remember the proverb; “Good fences make good neighbors”.
Geoffrey Britain:
neo does. She provides a link to Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Walls,” which may be the popular source of the proverb.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall
Frederick,
If it was a German accent than the “th” sound would have definitely been more like a “t” with no “h.” When Germans make fun of my heavily accented speech when speaking their language I simply ask them to speak the English word, “the.” Their word, “Neanderthal,” is pronounced, “Neandertal.” We Americans incorrectly add our “th” sound to it.
It’s obviously quite natural to us, but “th” is a unique sound. It’s not just getting the tongue on the right spot on the teeth, but it’s moving the tongue and expending air at just the right time. It’s honestly quite humorous to watch Germans try to do it. It takes a lot of practice, just as it did for me to pronounce the back of the throat sound they make in words like, “ich,” and “dich.” I literally had to stand in front of a mirror to get my tongue just right.
Then there’s the khoisan language…
Rufus. Heard the Khoisan click is used because its duration is too short to alert prey. Interesting to find out.
When I was in Norwich, and my father pronouncing it all his life, the river was the “thaymes”.
But then the town was Narrich, and Taftville was Taffil. Taffil was strongly French influenced, probably by a bunch pitched out of Canada after the Plains of Abraham fight.
Richard Aubrey,
Then there’s “Arkansas” with the second “s” becoming a “w,” and “Kansas” where no such thing occurs. I genuinely feel sorry for foreigners learning to spell and read English words.
Interesting theory on the click language. I wonder if it’s less to do with the brevity of the sound and more to do with its sound wave pattern. I’ve heard duck quacks don’t echo, which makes no sense to me, but maybe the clicks do something similar to the air, which many animals can’t detect?
The beginning of Robert Frost’s “Directive”:
“Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry –
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there’s a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods’ excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?” etc.
“A town that is no more a town.” Plenty of those in New England, including under Quabbin Reservoir in west-central Massachusetts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quabbin_Reservoir
Lots of old cellar holes and stone walls in the woods around Quabbin. Ghost country.
I genuinely feel sorry for foreigners learning to spell and read English words.
Rufus T. Firefly:
I recall George Bernard Shaw’s attempt to reform English spelling. He pointed out that “fish” could as well be spelled “ghoti” in English.
I grew up in Lincoln MA when it still had farms. I thinned corn with the Brooks farm kids and later we moved near the Browning farm (200 year old house). At that time the Flint farm was still in business, also the Lawsons, the Cannons, the Denormandie dairy, and others. They are all pretty much gone these days along with the pig farms in Sudbury 🙂 Old pictures show what you describe: open, rolling countryside with stone walls. The whole town is now covered in trees and the typical house price is over a million. It is going to be a lot of work clearing the forests if Massachusetts ever has to grow its own food again.
There have been a lot of social changes as well, I recall the older Brooks boys out with shotguns during Halloween to protect their stand from a family who lived down Route 2 a ways, and who had threatened to trash it.
@ Hubert > “There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.” – Frost
I’m just going to pretend that’s a meaningful segue to this observation, because I didn’t see it in time for the Columbus Day thread:
https://spectator.org/historical-falsification-columbus-crimes/
The Historical Falsification of Columbus’ ‘Crimes’
In recent decades, Christopher Columbus has been demonized out of ignorance, hatred, and spite. by ARMANDO SIMÓN October 10, 2021, 11:05 PM
@ Richard Aubrey > “Mann, in his “1491” has some figures for the land which went out of agriculture and into forest at the advent of the European diseases.”
I was thinking of that but forgot where I had read it; possibly “1491” or maybe Jared Diamond’s “Collapse,” which talks a lot about deforestation, and not much about reforestation. Or some other book altogether.
I’ve seen the same claim crop up in discussions over the prevalence of wildfires exacerbated by bad forest management, and why the (mostly Californian) paeans to the “wild primeval forest of the indigenous people” is bunk.
The Native Americans managed their forests by fire, and the early letters William Penn wrote about his land grant mentioned specifically the open glades that made the forests easy to walk, and even ride, through, which in later reports had completely disappeared.
(Didn’t find that exact reference online, of course and too lazy to thumb through my books to locate it.)
https://lancasterconservation.org/wp-content/uploads/EDU.DCNR-HISTORY-TODAY-PA-FOREST-MANAGEMENT.pdf
We’ve been to Wales twice and the stone boundary walls are very distinctive and quite lovely, dividing the rich green pastures much like edging around quilt pieces.
This post describes them much as Neo did for New England.
https://www.farmcollector.com/farm-life/dry-stone-walls-of-britain-ancient-boundaries-still-defined-by-stacked-stone-walls/
The top picture on this one is more characteristic of walls around homesteads in the villages. The upright stones are for the purpose of shedding water, presumably so that the flat ones don’t erode or wash out of position.
http://drystonewallingnorthwales.com/the-heritage-of-wales-stonework-local-stone-types.html
It rains a LOT in Wales.
You can learn how to build your own walls from this one!
https://www.conservationhandbooks.com/dry-stone-walling/walls-in-the-landscape/characteristic-regional-walls/
Some slightly different walls. I think these are baked clay rather than stone, however.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/see-inside-tutankhamun-s-lost-city-recently-discovered/ss-AAPo3al?ocid=msedgntp#image=1
This post gives some new perspective on the old idiom.
https://grammarist.com/idiom/stonewall/
@ Rufus > “I genuinely feel sorry for foreigners learning to spell and read English words.”
Think of kindergarten kids being told that “C” (see) “A” (long sound) “T” spells kat, not sate. It’s a wonder any of us can read.
@ huxley – Shaw was passionate about reforming English spelling; ghoti is hilarious, and the internet is simplifying our language immensely.
The current trend to a more phonetic spelling of common words may or may not be a good thing. It was started by the needs of companies to Trademark names, which can’t be done with the traditional spelling of common words.
Also, I continually see, even in “better” publications or sites, the replacement of irregular verbs with what would be the regular-formed versions that English has never used until the current age. “Pleaded” for “pled” is one I mentioned yesterday, noting that the correct form, surprisingly, was used. Of course, it was in a Bookworm / Widburg post, so only to be expected.
And then there is the proliferation of mouses in everything except computer-related writing.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-pioneer-ov-simplified-speling-vol-1-no-1-1912
Trivia note: the spelling “ov” replacing “of” is actually unnecessary IF you are speaking Welsh, where a single “f” is always rendered as “v”, and “ff” used for the sound of “f” in most English words.
And don’t let’s get started on Henry Higgins or the G&S “often / orphan” schtick.
It’s better listened to than read, of course.
https://www.gsarchive.net/pirates/web_op/pirates13d.html
And then there’s this classic language bit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sShMA85pv8M
huxley @ 11:51pm,
I used that Shavian observation in my Master’s thesis.
AesopFan,
I have assumed that those brilliant kids in the Scripps National Spelling Bee almost always ask for the origins of words so they know what language it came from. Although extremely inconsistent, English spelling is typically consistent within the languages of origin. French words we have adopted follow French phonetics, German, Latin words we’ve adopted follow those languages.
My guess is those kids learn the phonetic approaches of those languages, along with English.
Yes, we have more trees than we did at the time of the revolution. Indeed, the earth has seen a 14% increase in vegetation in just the last 30 years. That increase in vegetation is equivalent to an area twice the size of the United States.
As for stone walls — drive around Williamson County (just south of Nashville), an area where lots of music stars and transplanted corporate execs have built homes on old farms, to see lots of these stacked stone walls along the old roads which go back decades.
re: walls and fences — see G.K. Chesterton. I would describe myself as a Chesterton libertarian. Don’t tear down that wall if you don’t know why it was built. Reasons matter, even if some hubristic, inexperienced leftist lacks the imagination and humility to ponder them.
Bryan,
I apologize for being less than clear. By rocks I mean those 40+ pound beasts that I find every time I need to dig. By stones I mean those small ones that you might skip across a pond.
He pointed out that “fish” could as well be spelled “ghoti” in English.
But it could not because it would violate the rules of English spelling to use “gh” to mean “f” at the beginning of an Anglo-Saxon word or to use “ti” to mean “sh” in any non-Latin word. English spelling is not strictly phonetic, but it does have rules. (I’ve really never understood the attitude that writing SHOULD be strictly phonetic because there are so many languages of great antiquity that are not written phonetically, for example the Chinese languages.)
English words are spelled by what language they came from; most of those languages have phonetic rules that are different from each other. The English words that came down from Old English are often spelled by the phonetic rules of 500 years ago. You don’t spell Latin-origin words the same way as French-origin or English-origin words. Knowing those three conventions is enough to spell correctly 99.99% of the time.
As far as the i before e thing goes I don’t think it’s much more confusing than the phonetically-spelled German language rules for when to use a single, double, or triple “s”, or the French rules about what syllables to elide. (Grossstadt, “metropolis”. You have to know it’s a compound word, one of which ends in double “s”–and the “st” is pronounced “sht”.)
Chuck: I grew up one town over from Hadley, Massachusetts. I’m happy to report that there are still plenty of cucumber, squash, and tobacco farms there. I picked cucumbers as a kid. My parents wouldn’t let me pick tobacco–too hot (you worked in summer under muslin tents), tar- and pesticide-soaked, and generally unhealthy. Amazingly, there are also still small family farms in the hill towns above and to the west of the Connecticut River Valley. God knows how they manage to hang on.
AesopFan: the disappearance of towns and other human landmarks in New England predates the first stirrings of wokeness by well over a century. It’s a recurring theme in Frost’s early poetry (in addition to the poem cited above, see “The Black Cottage” or “The Wood-pile”). But yes, those lines from “Directive” do mesh well with Kundera’s observation and the article on Columbus. Frost would have understood what is going on now. In fact, there was an earlier thread about his crossing rhetorical swords with “experimental educator” Alexander Meiklejohn at Amherst College in 1917 or thereabouts.
Rufus T. Firefly
My guess is those kids learn the phonetic approaches of those languages, along with English.
As someone with the “spelling gene”, that’s exactly what I did. Other languages aren’t necessarily spelled phonetically (cough*French*cough), but once you learn the conventions, English words of French origin are pretty consistent. Likewise Spanish, Latin, Greek, etc.
“Meringue” tripped me up when I came in 2nd in the state of Alaska in 6th grade. I spelled it with an “A” not an “I”, because while I knew the “gue” convention, I didn’t know the French vowels as well.
John McWhorter points out that Anglophone countries are the only ones with spelling bees, because they would be pointless in just about all other written languages.
Bryan Lovely,
Congrats on the second place!
And thanks for the information regarding spelling bees in foreign countries. I wondered about that, but never knew the actual answer. As you write, it would seem unnecessary (even impossible to ever get to a winner) in most, other languages.
Frederick,
Yes, English has conventions, but they are not obvious and have to be learned. I have a fair amount of facility with German and some with Latin, Spanish and Italian. Despite the many typos I make here, I’m a pretty decent English speller, but I never make mistakes when writing German, Latin, Spanish or Italian. If I hear someone speak a word properly in those languages I automatically know how it is spelled. Not so with English. I also have to know about its etymology. That’s a very different thing.
I was a good speller from an early age and always assumed it was simply because I read a lot, although I had bright friends who also read a lot who struggled with spelling. When I was in my mid-30s I had a co-worker ask me how to spell a word. I paused, then spoke the letters to him. He asked, “How do you do that?” It was the first time in my life I had ever thought about it so I paused, and thought again of the word he had just asked me to spell, and I realized I literally saw the word in my mind’s eye (sort of a space about a foot in front of my forehead) and read the letters aloud, just like I was reading them off the page of a book.
Decades ago I asked a friend how Med School was going. She said it was going well, easier than Undergrad. I was shocked! She noticed my incredulousness and said, “Oh, don’t you know I have a photographic memory? (We had gone to High School together.) Once I read a page it’s there forever and I can recall the entire page again in the future. Medical school is just all memorization from texts and spitting it back out on the exam.”
I imagine we different humans have different ways of mastering similar feats. The results appear identical, but how we get there may often differ greatly.
I literally saw the word in my mind’s eye (sort of a space about a foot in front of my forehead)
I’m the same, except it’s about an inch behind my eyes.
For coming in 2nd place I won an Encyclopedia Britannica (1976 Bicentennial Edition), which I used the hell out of in junior and senior high. I left it with my parents when I moved out on my own, and I’m still angry with my dad for just getting rid of it sometime in the ’00s without telling me.
I have watched that video now, a couple of times.
And although the screenplay may have been based on some real event, I have trouble believing that an experienced farmer would be stupid enough to attempt what the actor is depicted as doing.
The stone looks to be – though it is not fully shown – about 3 feet long on at least one axis. Call it half of a 3 ft diameter stone sphere for flattening’s sake. Call it sedimentary rock rather than granite. Even accounting for several rough reductions in volume for the sake of argument, there have to be five or six cubic feet of rock there. Granite is 175 lbs a cubic foot. Even figuring 100 lbs per cubic foot for limestone, that weight is too heavy for a simple pry bar to lift to a sledge. And the idea of placing your shoulder to it is near suicidal. Tempting perhaps, but the mind knows, or should know, better.
I have moved 4′ x 2.5 ‘ x say, 20″ thick granite stones from the field in a hydraulic powered front end loading bucket attached to a Ford diesel tractor of a modest 30 HP. and the front tires nearly flattened.
Farmers are hurt and killed, and not as infrequently as we would like to think, even nowadays.
But that scene, while affecting, seems not true to life.
Of course, he’s a Swede, so who knows. Figures on killing or maiming himself to save wear and tear on the oxen.
DNW:
Watch out, the Swedish Thought Police might get you! 🙂
That movie is based on some very famous Swedish novels written between 1949 and 1953 by Swedish novelist Vilhelm Moberg, who was born in 1898. I can’t vouch for the historical accuracy of the rock’s size, but the novels are very famous in Sweden. The scene is meant to show how hard the work was at that time in Sweden, and I imagine that is certainly the case. The man in the scene isn’t killed, by the way – the rock falls on his leg and he is crippled.
When you burn brush in forests, the ash is basic and water leaching through offsets the acidic forest soil.
Richard Aubrey,
Tell that to Gavin Newsom.
A set of encyclopedias was advertised as an essential investment for a middle class family in the 1950s and 1960, and 70’s
As a kid, we were never allowed to use them for writing grade school research papers; or if permitted, to be only one of some 7 or 8 sources.
I craved a set as a kid, but the family never got one. Hell, if the less prosperous families in the local neighborhoods – working class ones with 6 kids and parents who never went to college – had them, why didn’t we? LOL
And of course, by the 1990s or so, they had become viewed as a bit passe, if not even comical examples of social striving.
Yet, in visiting relatives who had inherited extremely outdated encyclopedia sets on the books shelves of the old house they bought, I could not get enough of browsing them. They also had a series of year books from the 20’s through early 50’s, which dealt with politics and technology – though I don’t recall what the titles were.
Some of the older commenters here might remember who put them out and in what varieties.
These obsolete books are of astonishing interest; and I fear that most of them may be lost forever as libraries dump them, and Americans transition to living in the politically induced fog of an eternal Now.
The only problem with picking up a volume from a decades old encyclopedia set, is that you cannot force yourself to put it down.