Customer Reviews

Shallow Water Dictionary

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What a gem of a book! Who would have know that a topic as esoteric as the 19th century English of eastern American coastal marshes could be so interesting, and that such a small book could deliver so much information? One learns the correct usage of the word "creek", the difference between a "gutter" and a "guzzle", the etymology of "schooner", and a detailed description of the elusive "gundalow". John Stilgoe provides some great comparisons of the unabridged dictionaries of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, as well.

"Shallow Water Dictionary" is written as a narrative, a lament for the loss of words from dictionary English, arrived at while the author pilots his rowboat, "Essay" (A pretty enough boat, then, with lines more gentle than a skiff...), through the saltwater marshes of Massachusetts.

Don't be put off by its small size; lovers of the English language will find this book to be a good reference that is also enjoyable to read.

John Stilgoe's "Shallow Water Dictionary" is a fascinating essay on the "lost" landscape of salt marshes and the language needed to describe them. He tracks down the sources of words such as "skiff" and explores the vagueness of definition found in words such as "creek", "brook", and "flotsam and jetsam". His references to historical dictionaries plot the changing importance of these words over time as society's attention wandered elsewhere.

Anyone who spends time in a small boat or who loves the language of the sea will find this book immensely satisfying.

This book is one of my absolute favorites books of the past several years - a tiny jewel of a book. While it contains lots of interesting facts for boaters and word-lovers, it is also lyrically poetic (Stilgoe's MOST poetic work, quite unlike his other books), evoking the images, rhythms and sounds of an oft-neglected but major aspect of coastal New England - and makes you really want to see for yourself what it's like to paddle through - the coastal marshlands. For anyone who loves the ocean, secret places, history, nature-lovers, book-lovers, this book will slowly unwind it's magic on you.

Many who read this will miss the main point. Of course it's about words, but it's more about "seeing" as in "I see." Frost said that he wrote as he wrote so that the wrong people wouldn't get it and be saved. This book has some of that in it. Don't let its almost being a dictionary or the title fool you.

John Stilgoe gives it away on page 54 where he says,"Landscape-or seascape-that lacks vocabulary cannot be seen, cannot be accurately, usefully visited." It's not just a question of vocabulary or even vision. It's all about perception, experience, and finally, reality.

If you frequent the backwaters solo in shallow draft unmotorized craft, Stilgoe's views play right along with your wanderings. His expansions on physical entities as diverse as the "guzzles" for which you never had a word, to the lesson in full appreciation of "chartreuse" touches here and there, through the care and use of "sea marks" in places and times present and gone are just the kind of thinking you tend to do during a sixteen thousand stroke day in the marshes. New territory in a favorite place.

The single most arcane book I have ever encountered, and a delight to all scholars of the English language. The degree to which our hertiage is maritime is made clear in this precise examination of how the littoral of the American east coast influenced the development of how we speak.

This book is scholarly, poetic and contemplative, which I love.

Thesis is that landscape is always in flux, and with it even our way of looking at it, and talking about it. It's quirky, conversational and absorbing, even if marshland and nautical history isn't your field. The evolution of language is my interest and the main reason I purchased it. The book's strongest point for me was to reveal how dictionaries are constantly changing in their definitions through the centuries, rather like the esoteric landscape this book describes.

I have to advise, though, that this is a medium-length essay, it's not really a book. Opening Amazon's over-sized packaging, I found the smallest book I ever seen. There are some very basic illustrations that are truly disappointing, a fancy printed binding that dwarfs the handful of actual printed pages, and some eccentric typefaces that I hope never to read again. Over the top for an academic essay - ought to be a download from the Harvard archives.