Let it flow, or not

                                                      Photo by Ezra Comeau-Jeffrey on Unsplash

Languages develop rich vocabularies when they are needed.  The United Kingdom is defined by water, either in standing bodies around and in it or coming from the skies above it or rising from the earth below it. As a consequence of this state of wetness as well a propensity for going to distant foreign lands, the English language has an incredible number of words describing bodies of water, flowing or standing.

One criterium distinguishing the terms is size. Going upwards, a rivulet is small indeed, rare to see and almost ignorable as is rill or streamlet.  A brook being a tad bigger and more conspicuous. Getting wider, a stream or creek or in some places in the northern UK a burn will definitely get your shoes wet unless you jump over it and probably has some small fish. At some point, the water volume increases and becomes a river, a powerful current that requires swimming to cross. By the way, the legendary (for Christians) “mighty Jordan River” is more like a stream than a river but everything is a bit exaggerated in the Middle East.

For standing bodies of water, nature creates puddles, which are tempory and longer term water holes, which are okay for finding drinking water but not much more than that. With better conditions, it can be a pond, a nice place to go on a hot summer’s day. When the ideal land and water combine, a lake is formed, filled with fish and boats. Regarding holy overselling, the Sea of Galilee, otherwise known as the Kinneret, is actually a lake. Once you can no longer see the other side, it becomes a sea, deep and dangerous. Finally, the largest bodies of water are oceans, impressive by all criteria.

Alas, this basic vocabulary only just scratches the services as bodies of water are defined by their environment and their function in it. Rivers can be tributaries or distributaries, depending on whether they feed into or from the main river. They can be rapids, with clean and white water, or deltas, slow and muddy. They can flow once when it rains, as a wadi, or have a constant flow of organic material, as a bayou, a word used in the U.S. South. Human beings can create trenches or runnels to allow water to flow in a field.

Likewise, a water hole with man-made improved access for drinking water is a well or, on a larger scale, a reservoir. Flat land areas that are periodically covered with water are called tidal zones or flood plains, depending on the frequency and cause of the invading water. You can find a channel between two large bodies of land. A lagoon is cut off from the adjacent body of water while an estuary is connected. The Scots would call either a loch but theirs are colder and deeper. Marshes has a lower level of water and grasses while swamps have deeper water and trees. Together they are called wetlands.

English and water or inexorably connected as any conversation in London will remind you. This intimacy requires a rich pool of words to describe its nuances. The physical environment does have a huge impact on language. To massacre that famous Dean Martin song, “let it flow, let it flow, let it flow.”