Distinctly Montana Magazine

w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m 89 with CHRYSTI THE WORDSMITH W I L D W E S T W O R D S GLACIER There are approximately 190,000 glaciers scattered about the face of the planet. Montana's own aptly named Glacier National Park claims 26 of those. Massive, frozen rivers, moving at a "glacial pace" ever downhill, these icy juggernauts are nevertheless considered sensitive indicators of climate change. Around the world, glaciologists measure, gauge, and drill into glaciers to evaluate the effect of greenhouse gases on these receding bodies of ice. These days, when most of us think of glaciers, images like this come to mind. But in the mid-18th century, a wealthy young Englishman named William Windham could not have imagined a world of darkened, shrinking glaciers. In 1741, Windham and several of his gentried peers, in the first wave of the tsunami of tourists to come, journeyed to Chamonix, a village in the French Alps. Hiring locals to guide them far into the mountains, they encountered a gleaming snowfield cradled in a valley near Mt. Blanc. Windham christened the nival mass Mer de Glace, "Sea of Ice," a name the glacier still carries. Returning to England in 1742, William Windham prepared a pamphlet describing his icy adventures in the French Alps. Titled Letter from an English gentleman... giving an account of a journey to the glacieres or ice alps of Savoy, the publication gave the En- glish-speaking world the term glacier. Windham borrowed the word from the French dialect spoken in Chamonix. Glacier, in turn, comes from Old French glace and Latin glacis, both meaning "ice." Glacier is etymologically related to the words congeal and gelid, both "frozen" words at heart. HYALITE: A GEM OF A CANYON When geologists take a hike, they see things the rest of us don't. And what the geologists saw in a canyon near present-day Bozeman shaped southwest Montana's linguistic heritage. In 1882, members of a U.S. geological expedition spied col- lections of small, transparent opals embedded in slabs of basalt throughout the canyon. They recognized the stone as hyalite, a gem unique to environments shaped by volcanic activity. Coined by a German mineralogist in 1794, hyalite is the combination of the Greek word for "glass" and the common mineral-marking suffix –ite (as in dolomite, andesite, and lignite). The 1882 expedition geologists dubbed the most prominent mountain in the area Hyalite Mountain, and Hyalite Canyon was officially named in 1928. INFLUENZA In 1918 and 1919, an influenza outbreak, cited as the most devastating pandemic in history, claimed at least 50 million lives worldwide. A fifth of the world's population was infected by this virulent strain of virus, which acquired the moniker "Spanish Flu." In Montana, nearly 5,000 lost their lives to the disease. Influenza epidemics have ravaged human populations throughout antiquity. Hippocrates observed and recorded what he called the "Cough of Perinthus" now believed to be a flu epidemic gripping a Greek city in 412 BC. Since 1580, at least 31 influenza outbreaks have been recorded. The word influenza came directly to English from Italian, where it simply means "influence." The term was originally associated with astrology; influ- enza was believed to be an ethereal fluid flowing from the stars to the earth where it literally "influenced" the destinies of human beings. Throughout the 1600s, the sudden emergence of diseases whose terrestrial causes were not apparent was blamed on the influenza of the stars. In 1743, Italy was struck with what has since been identified as the flu, but at the time was called influenza di cattaro, or the "influence of catarrh." By the time the illness and its name had reached England, it was known simply as influenza. The clipped form, flue, appeared in print in the 1830s, and flu, in 1893.

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