You're listening to a way with words this show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Burnett, ephemeral creek, ribbon fall, hourglass valley, gallery forest.

And you won't see these terms in most dictionaries, but they've been used for years in various

locales to describe the things that people see in and on the land.

And they're part of a vocabulary that most of us rarely, if ever, encounter a vocabulary of place.

Like, take the term gallery forest, for example.

It's a forest that grows along the banks of a river in open prairie country.

Sometimes their canopies on either side grow close enough together to form a tunnel-like corridor over the water.

And the term gallery forest is adapted from the Spanish gallery or overhanging balcony.

There are more than 800 of these terms in a remarkable book that came out a few years ago.

It's called Homeground, language for an American landscape.

And the editors, Barry Lopez and Deborah Gwartney, approach the challenge of compiling these terms in a really interesting way.

They asked 45 well-known writers, people like John Crackauer and Terry Tempest Williams and Luis Urea and Barbara King-Solver,

to research these words in the standard specialized reference works and then write brief entries about them,

explaining what the terms mean and the parts of the continent where you're likely to encounter them.

And Grant, the book is really a kind of tonic for the mind.

It's this new lens for looking at the environment.

And it forces you to ponder what we lose if we don't have the terms to talk about the features of a landscape or the environment.

What happens if we had those words once, but increasingly they're forgotten?

I agree, yes, I've browsed this book and I find it beautiful and evocative.

It's a book that I think you want when you're lonely, even.

...