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.
But that’s how the roof looks – like a shallow depression, not a peak? I have no clue how to call in English. Multitran translates to Russian as expected, nizina, and back as valley-bottom, depression, sink, and one word I never heard before, baygall
Hmm, that does make sense in terms of shape — but why would you choose an obscure term with semantic contexts (“moist or marshy depression in a tract of land,” “hollow between adjacent sand-ridges”) that have nothing to do with architecture? Why not just “a dip [or “hollow”] instead of a peak”? It seems like unnecessary obfuscation. But I think you must be right, and it’s just an odd word choice (that the magazine’s fabled early editors would have insisted be changed).
For what it’s worth, Wiktionary says it’s “perhaps of North Germanic origin; akin to Old Norse svalr (‘cool, fresh’), Icelandic svalir (‘a balcony running along a wall’).” Though the Old Norse and Icelandic words wouldn’t seem, on the face of it, to have anything to do with each other semantically.
What are folksy-archaic words for expressing something like the mathematician’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle_point?
it can also be a landscaping term, very narrowly specific and looking even more alike:
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=28f8fab5923385a6&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS1127US1127&sxsrf=ADLYWIJhODoa_dQuOKJouWeRiAi4xqZECg:1729017904579&q=swale+landscaping&udm=2&fbs=AEQNm0A-5VTqs5rweptgTqb6m-Eb3TvVcv4l7eCyod9RtZW98xhblUVZPzVv1Bs6vKE1-BNpBZmVjXeMAEihQ07BrNjgBSVvptKTZ7uCSG2sfXEVsO_pq2-9eYfDmFIvpWURPxBy2dHdTrJZ9WvwIReBsLqr_lfhhPYozrWO3RY3-6-S7MwR0wo4T9oVG9TiNfv_UFW7dSGWrLdZINas3vzKmHJ2nfDDLQ&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwjM3ozQhZGJAxXKD0QIHQYyNJEQtKgLegQIFhAB&biw=1536&bih=834&dpr=1.25
(you wouldn’t want to say that an interesting architectural design looks like a simple friggin’ ditch, right? )
OK, those photos are convincing — that must be what she had in mind. Thanks! (Though I still wonder how widespread awareness of the term is…)
It wouldn’t have occurred to me to look if not for the weirdest Russian word suggested by multitran as a translation: валоканава! (And, yes, I checked, it really exists … not like the legendary Тояма Токанава)
And yes, I bet most Americans are absolutely unaware
I picked up this term during a grad degree in landscape architecture, where it is a common term of art, and I have never heard it outside of that context (not even in reference to a building, though I got what Kolbert was getting at). Most narrowly it means a linear wet depression in the ground; a bioswale is a swale planted to filter out pollutants from stormwater running off of a road. It also gets generalized to mean any linear sunken feature; it is the topographic inverse of a ridge.
Thanks! Kolbert must be familiar with it in that context and thought her use was a reasonable extension. Which it is, if you know the term!
As an occasional watcher of golf on TV, I’m familiar with swale. It’s the go-to word for a shallow depression, often adjacent to the green, that can collect an off-target shot and make the next one difficult.
ON svali m. meant 1. “cold, coolness” 2. ‘unhappiness, sad state”, says my dictionary. No architectural sense, but the Icelandic word as well as Norw. svale m. “gallery or arcade around a traditional building” seem to show that it existed already in ON times. I wanted to find a purely architectural semantic path from “gallery” to “V-shaped roof”, but I don’t think there is one. I think the path is “coolness” -> “shaded place” (hence also the first architectural sense) -> “artificial landscape element creating a shade or a hidden path” -> “roof resembling such a landscape element”.
Edit: Or what bentelec said. Replace “Artificial…” with “Linear wet depression in the ground”
That makes sense.
bentelec has explained it well, but for those who like belts and braces…
“ What is a Drainage Swale?
Let’s start with the dictionary definition of swale, which is — according to Merriam-Webster — “a low-lying or depressed and often wet stretch of land.”
Swale Uses
Guide water away from homes and roadways
Direct water to gardens
Prevent flooding
Capture rain water for reuse
Swales can be part of an area’s natural landscaping, or they can be created to help ensure proper drainage, minimize runoff or capture storm water. In simple terms, they are generally shallow ditches that have gently sloping sides. Depending on their function, they may run along the contour lines of a hillside and may have a berm on the downhill side of the ditch. They rely on gravity to move water and are designed to direct the water where we want it to go.”
source: https://www.installitdirect.com/learn/landscape-swale/
may have a berm on the downhill side of the ditch.
Berm ?? I’m still adjusting to swale.
I’m pretty sure I learned “swale” after I moved to New Mexico as the translation of Spanish ciénega, a wet low spot in a dry plain (said to be from cien aguas ‘100 waters’). Wikipedia says this kind of wetland is unique to the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico.
(I’d probably seen “swale” earlier but hadn’t bothered to look it up. I think I knew it before I saw it in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, unless I have things in the wrong order.)
@Jerry,
The etymology of ciénega/ciénaga is more apt to be—
“ ETIMOLOGÍA DE LA PALABRA CIÉNEGA
La palabra ciénega procede del latín *caenĭca, de caenum, cieno.”
Cieno Is mud. Or sludge. Or silt.
ciénega, a wet low spot in a dry plain (said to be from cien aguas ‘100 waters’).
Yeah, and siéntate is from “100 sit-downs”.
There’s a River Swale in Yorkshire, which runs through Swaledale.
“The name ‘Swale’ is from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘Sualuae’ meaning ‘rapid and liable to deluge'” according to https://www.yorkshiredales.org.uk/places/river_swale/
That doesn’t even look like a possible Old English word.
Looks like a variant of *sw(e)alwe ‘rushing water’ (given as an etymon in A.D. Mills, English Place Names).
@cuchuflete: Thanks. I should have figured that didn’t look right.
Are you now going to tell me that bruja isn’t from Hebrew brakhah, máscara isn’t from más cara, querencia isn’t a blend of querer and herencia, and the nickname “Pepe” for “José” isn’t from p[adre] p[utativo]? (Just kidding—but I’ve been assured of all of those.)
Yes, in your yard a swale is a low depression water during a big rain goes through (not an uncommon term even in the US if you garden). So if you grade your yard away from the house but there is a higher piece of land nearby, you build a swale with some water friendly plants and the water runs down that low point. In architecture, then, it is just a depression rather than a peak in the center as you had guessed.
The Chicago area has natural swales, formed by the dunes of successive post-glacial versions of Lake Michigan, so our landscaping swales are called rain gardens. The Indiana Dunes were a key focus of early prairie ecology out of the U of C, and it still informs local ideas of natural land, so swale is a fairly well-known term here. For example, here’s a Nature Conservancy property called Ivanhoe Dune and Swale.