Category: City Life

The ground is cold, but the asphalt path is still warm. The contrast in temperatures produces a corresponding contrast in the visual field. White remains at the edges of the path while the path reveals itself, snaking its dark line into the distance.

This is an apocalyptic scene. We tend to think of an apocalyptic scene as something dramatic, possibly associated with the end of the world, rivers of blood, lakes of fire, that sort of thing. But here I use the word in its original sense, the way ancient Greeks used it before early medieval religious nuts got their hands on the word and made a mess of it.

In classical Greek, the prefix ἀπό (apo) indicates a movement away from something, hence, its opposite. In this case, ᾰ̓ποκᾰ́λῠψῐς (apocalypsis) denotes the opposite of being covered. In other words, uncovered or revealed. In classical Greek, there was nothing magical or catastrophic about apocalypsis. Presumably, it could refer to something as benign as playing peek-a-boo with a child. Or, in the case of my photograph, the appearance of a path when the snow melts.

For reasons I don’t understand, we’ve never been able to rescue the word from the fanatics who seized it. I wish there was a twelve step program for words that have grown dependent upon religious lunatics to give them a sense of cachet they don’t deserve. What’s wrong with being a modest word with no particular designs on the human imagination? There is a sense in which apocalypsis would reveal far more to us if it had less to do with revelation.

A path curves off to the distance. Nothing is revealed but the path itself. And we need nothing more than that simple curve to give us satisfaction.

My dad tells the story of how, when he was little, he thought his mother spoke French. Admittedly, she had a distinctive accent, but it was the sort of accent that came from Boston, not from Rimouski. My grandmother had that classic New England accent that does strange things to the letter “R”. It removes “R’s” from words where they belong (Hahvahd instead of Harvard), and adds “R’s” to words where they don’t belong (especially at the end of words that end in a vowel). To my grandmother, everything was a good idear. If you’ve ever listened to Major Charles Emerson Winchester, III from M*A*S*H (David Ogden Stiers) then you have a good idear how my grandmother spoke.

However, my grandmother developed some linguistic idiosyncrasies, maybe because she married a Canuck and moved north of the border. My grandfather was a minister and one of his early charges came with a manse that had no indoor plumbing. My dad doesn’t appear to have been traumatized by the experience. Nevertheless, he does recall one odd feature of his early toilet adventures. Whenever it looked like he might have to go to the bathroom, my grandmother would ask him if he had to go to the pouchaud and point to the outhouse.

This explains why my dad thought his mother spoke French. He had no idea what the word meant, but it sounded French, and he naturally assumed it had something to do with the outhouse. It wasn’t until later that he realized what she was saying: Do you have to go to the push hard? With her tendency to run words together coupled with her inability to say the letter “R,” she had effectively invented a new word, pouchaud. I don’t suppose it will ever find a place in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it has an honoured place in our private family dictionary.