meander

on things left inside words

The Büyük Menderes River is winding right now. Through the Aegean region of Turkey, cutting south and west toward the sea, it loops back on itself in great arcs, isolates old curves into standing pools, drops silt into new beds. It has been doing this for millions of years.

It doesn't know it gave us a word.

The ancient Greeks called it the Maiandros. It was famous — extraordinarily famous, not for battles or trade alone, but for how extravagantly it wound. Homer mentioned it. Strabo described its curves. Soldiers crossed it. Merchants followed it. It was one of the most winding rivers anyone in the ancient world had seen, and that winding was so extreme, so characteristic, so definitional of itself, that the river became the concept.

To meander. From the Maiandros.

What I mean is: you can say "to meander" — casually, without thought — to describe a conversation or a walk or the way someone tells a story, and the river is nowhere in the word anymore. It was present at the word's birth; now it's a ghost inside. The word contains a wandering, a lack of urgency, a curve without destination. It no longer contains a specific river, a latitude, a silt color, a fish population, a civilization that drank from its banks.

That specificity was the original. The abstraction ate it.

This happens to people too.

Henry Shrapnel invented a hollow shell filled with shot that would explode in the air above enemy lines. He spent years perfecting it. He was a real man, specific — with a face, with a handwriting, with opinions about things besides weapons. Now shrapnel is just flying metal. You can be hit by shrapnel with no knowledge of Shrapnel. He is in there, technically. But invisible.

General Ambrose Burnside wore spectacular facial hair down the sides of his face during the Civil War. People noticed. They called the style "burnsides." And then — at some point, in some conversation nobody recorded — the syllables flipped. Sideburns. He is inverted inside his own legacy, his name rearranged, visible only if you know to look for the seam.

Captain Charles Boycott managed land in County Mayo in 1880. His tenants — organized, furious — refused to work for him, refused to sell to him, refused to speak to him. The ostracism was so thorough and so public it became a verb. To boycott. He was boycotted into a word. Every boycott since has been a faint echo of his specific, forgotten misery.

The linguists call these words eponyms — words born of names. But eponym describes the relationship from outside, from above. It names the mechanism. It doesn't describe what it is like to be the undetected ghost in a word someone uses without thinking.

Disaster contains a star. Dis-aster — bad stars — when the stars were against you. Nobody feels the star in disaster. But the star is in there, cold and ancient, inside every calamity that has ever been described.

Lunatic contains the moon. People believed the moon drove you to madness. The moon continues to rise, pulling tides, being itself, unaware it is embedded in a word for the condition it supposedly caused.

Malaria contains bad air — mala aria. Before germ theory, you caught it by breathing marsh gas. The wrong theory is preserved in the word like a fly in amber. A fossil of a mistake, perfectly kept, passed forward through centuries of accurate diagnosis.

I keep coming back to the river.

The Büyük Menderes. Still winding. Still looping back on itself in the Aegean heat. The Turks kept the ancient name and translated it: Great Meander. The river named after the concept that the river made. It is its own legacy's shadow, carrying its abstracted self in its own name, winding through a landscape that now uses the word for what it does without knowing the word came from it.

When does a specific thing know it has become a category? Does the river feel the moment the word detached from it? Does Shrapnel's ghost flinch each time someone pulls metal from a wound?

They don't. Things can't feel themselves being swallowed into abstraction. That's part of what makes it so strange — the dissolution is painless, unnoticed, total. The river winds on. The word travels without it.

And this is also useful, which is the part that complicates the elegy. We need verbs that mean "to wander without purpose" without invoking a specific river in western Turkey every time. The river gave itself to us. The word is the river's most successful migration — it entered English, then French and German and Japanese and Spanish, wound through millions of conversations about thoughts and speeches and walks that had nowhere particular to go. Maybe that is what a river becomes, eventually, if it is interesting enough and old enough and winding enough. It becomes the idea of itself. It becomes available to everyone who has never stood on its banks and never will.