Earthly Words

The Halifax Chronicle Herald runs a Vintage Nova Scotia photograph daily, and today on page A2 the photo featured a tellurometer, a measuring tool used by the Lawrencetown Land Survey Institute in May, 1966. Here is a picture from a stamp of a tellurometer and its inventor. In Latin tellus, telluris f. is a noun that means “earth, soil, land, country, world,” a synonym for the more familiar terra, terrae f. "earth, land, ground, country, region.” From both of these Latin roots we have wonderful English words such as tellurian (of the earth; terrestrial), telluric (relating to the earth), terrene (mundane, earthly), terreplein (level space behind a parapet of a rampart where guns are mounted), terricolous (living on or in the ground), terrier (a dog originally used by hunters to dig animals out of the earth), and terrigenous (born of earth or relating to oceanic sediment derived from rocks on the earth’s surface). Also from terra is tureen (an earthenware dish for serving food), but not terrapin (Algonquian, a kind of turtle) or terry (French, from the verb which means “to draw”) as in terry cloth. I enjoyed consulting Webster's New Encyclopedic Dictionary as well as dictionary.com and the Oxford English Dictionary. The perfect adjective to describe the state of the yard after six days of pouring rain here in Nova Scotia is terraqueous (consisting of land and water).