The wind stayed on

It’s been with us now for 36 hours, a brash wind from the coast.  It pulled down one of our potted bamboo trees, a goliath now on the ground with a broken pot.  There will be a replanting today. In these 36 hours, doors have slammed throughout the complex, people have rushed to gather up their things that blew out of their hands, hats have been tossed.  The sound of the wind is what stirs me most –air molecules zipping about causing a wispy sound somewhere in the range of 2kHz – 6kHz when it’s slight and then a deeper crashing tone when it pushes other debris in its wake.

The language of English can be odd sometimes as the word wind can be a noun or a verb and mean something quite different. Funny that.

Borrowed bits from our Dictionary.com friend, I found

noun:

1.  air in natural motion, as that moving horizontally at any velocity along the earth’s surface

or my favorite:

2. air that is blown or forced to produce a musical sound in singing or playing an instrument as in “wind instrument“.

The word’s origin:  before 900; Middle English  (noun), Old English;  cognate with Dutch, German Wind, Old Norse vindr, Gothicwinds, Latin ventus

Have you ever thought about the word “window”? Yes, it’s a portal through which to see but it’s also something to keep the wind out.  (windowt…or maybe not if it’s open as mine is at the moment.)

ASIDE:  And now from a bit of research, I found something most excellent:  Thinkmap’s  Visual Thesaurus! Of course, I subscribed right away.  Being an educator and a writer, this will enhance many a class lecture and a few blog posts, I’m sure.  Oh, happy Monday morning.

   

Breeze, now there’s a charming word.  I tried it on my new visual thesaurus and a load of wonders appeared on my screen:  it’s a light wind, yes, but can be used as a verb as well as in: “I breezed through that exam.”  Or it can be a noun of a different meaning as in: “That exam was a breeze, a cinch, a piece of cake, a snap.”   How I love language!

And then I remembered that my favorite story, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” written by L. Frank Baum in 1900 begins with, “Chapter 1.  The Cyclone“.  Now that’s DRAMA!