Yander

‘Gonna have a yander.” my friend Lori exclaimed recently.

Can’t say I was familiar with that as a word and I can’t let a word go by if I don’t know what it means. It’s part of loving words. I’ve done it all my life. I’ll make a note of the word and look it up before the day is over. And yes, since you are dying to call me a name, it is geeky. But it’s what I do, so back off!

When I was seventeen I spent my summer after my first year at the University of Victoria working in the Columbia River Valley, in behind the Mica Dam, near Revelstoke British Columbia. It was hard work but I was young and fit. We were auditing timber which was to be removed, before the area behind the massive dam was flooded. It was high adventure and could be dangerous, with extended camping in Grizzly country, dramatic helicopter flights in and out of very tight spaces and navigating the mighty Columbia River during the spring run off.

Many mornings we were transported up flooding river. I would sit at the front of the long flat bottomed boats as we pounded our way past massive boulders and fallen trees, my book of the day in my lap, every word I did not know underlined in ink, for later inquiry. And these were the classics, not a John Grisham novel to be found. I was in my glory, uncluttered and undisturbed as we careened up the river to our destination. Each night before bed I would go through every word I had underlined and look it up, talking out loud as I tried them on in a sentence. I’m sure my crew mates thought I was odd as hell. Good thing I played rugby, they would have needed some sort of grounding wire to help them adjust.

And perhaps I was a little off, a lucky guess on their part at best but it may explain how my friend saying she was gonna have a yander, caught my attention. My loins stirred, metaphorically speaking, as I thought she just might have stumbled upon a new word, exciting stuff indeed in my world.

So naturally my first etymological inquiry was the dictionary. I knew immediately I was on to something. The Merriam Webster stretched credibility with a suggestion that ‘yander’ was a dialectal variant of ‘yonder’. Balderdash! It didn’t match my friends contextual reference at all, which was to ‘have a yander’, meaning a look see, a walkabout.

Therefore I am claiming, on behalf of my friend, that she has created a new and hitherto non existent word. Her name Lori Kirby, to be forever linked, as the etymological birth mother of ‘YANDER’. She will be so proud.

Of course language is a living thing, moving and changing all the time. We know that from annual lists of new words. This year the Oxford dictionary added 900 new words, among them ‘floordrobe’, that pile of clothing in your son’s room. Love that stuff.

I do bear some resentment to my friend’s discovery. I mean it wasn’t as though she was looking for a new word, neither was she ambitious to be so recognized. As a man who has searched his entire life for just two things, a nickname and a new word, this is indeed a hard pill to swallow.

It is a disappointment I shall have to carry alone, a private burden to bear, no etymollifier to soothe me.

What, wait a minute … an ety what … and etymollifier … yes, two l’s … I have to go.