People who are unfamiliar with the American Southwest in the winter would be surprised to see a camper get out of bed and quickly grab a winter coat and stocking hat. And shoes go on quickly -- the RV floor feels like ice. Why call it a stocking hat? One morning I became obsessed with this issue. It doesn't look very much like a stocking. The name conjures up images of Hans Christian Andersen or maybe a painting of Dutch ice skaters back in the 1700s.
Wouldn't a young person scoff at 'stocking hat' as an old-fashioned term? On Amazon I actually had to think what term wasn't antiquated. They used 'beanie'. And yes, the human skull looks more like a bean than a stocking. I prefer 'skull cap.'
Suddenly I thought of those books about the history of the English language. They sometimes say the normal rate of evolution of a language means unintelligibility in 1000 years. Of course 1000 is just a convenient round number. Foreign invasions will change the timetable by a bit.
The 1000-year rule feels abstract and general, and therefore uninteresting to me. But when brought down to a personal level, the rule becomes 'alive'.
The same sort of thing happens on a grander time frame on the morning doggie walk through the arroyo. The sidewalls of the arroyo are usually a sedimentary layer of some kind. If uniform, it is hard to get interested in it. And then you see sudden changes:
How did something as big as the Earth change so quickly? Talk about 'climate change!' If the walker had a magnifying glass and looked at the transition as closely as possible,
how many human lifetimes took place during that 'abrupt' transition? (Not that homo sapiens was actually around back them.)
The buildup of sedimentary layers...the evolution of language. It is what Henry David Thoreau would have called "the frostwork of a longer night."
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