It’s time once again to play What Did That Writer Mean? Elizabeth Kolbert (who often reports in the New Yorker) is one of the best popular science writers around, and she knows how to grab and hold your attention; witness the start of her latest piece, “When the Arctic Melts” (archived):
In the middle of the night in the middle of the summer in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet, I woke to find myself with a blinding headache. An anxious person living in anxious times, I’ve had plenty of headaches, but this one felt different, as if someone had taken a mallet to my sinuses. I’d flown up to the ice the previous afternoon, to a research station owned and operated by the National Science Foundation. The station, called Summit, sits ten thousand five hundred and thirty feet above sea level. The first person I’d met upon arriving was the resident doctor, who warned me and a few other newcomers to expect to experience altitude sickness. In most cases, he said, this would produce only passing, hangover-like symptoms; on occasion, though, it could result in brain swelling and death. Belatedly, I realized that I’d neglected to ask how to tell the difference.
(Fear not, she survived the experience.) But later on, in describing a museum in Ilulissat, the “iceberg capital of the world,” she writes: “From the outside, the Icefjord Centre looks like a cross between a milking barn and a concert hall, with lots of metal beams and a roof that meets in a swale instead of a peak.” I knew I had seen the word swale at some point, but I had no idea what it meant; I asked my wife, and she said she thought it was a sort of swamp, which turns out to be the general idea — if you google it the first result is “a low or hollow place, especially a marshy depression between ridges.” But how would that describe a roof? So I investigated further, and it turns out the OED has four separate nouns of that spelling: swale³ ‘A hollow, low place,’ swale¹ ‘Timber in laths, boards, or planks,’ swale² ‘Shade; a shady place,’ and swale⁴ ‘A small broom or brush without a stick for a handle.’ They’re all described as either local or dialect, but swale³ has more citations and seems more widespread, so here’s the full definition:
A hollow, low place; esp. U.S., a moist or marshy depression in a tract of land, esp. in the midst of rolling prairie. Also (U.S.) a hollow between adjacent sand-ridges.
Any idea how that might apply to the Kolbert quote? If you’re curious to see the building itself, voilà.
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