Weekend word T

It is not that I have forgotten about weekend words. It's a matter of time management. And I think I need a new dictionary. Well, I guess I don't have to have a new one, but I have been looking. I saw a single-volume dictionary at Hastings that was only $12.99 and it seemed pretty good. It had a lot of very recent words, but limited etymologies. I was looking through the T section when I saw TELLURIAN (accent on the second syllable). It comes from the Latin word for earth and just means "coming from earth." But the dictionary pointed out that the term was used in science fiction to refer to "earthlings." So you run into tellurians every day. Maybe you have wanted to ask someone, "You're not actually tellurian, are you?"

A comment from my eldest son made me think about Scouting days. What friendships we had then! My buddy was John Rollins. He was about a year older than I and on a weeklong campout in New Mexico one year, we were the ranking Scouts. That meant that near the end of the week, John and I were allowed to climb a nearby mountain alone. Our Scoutmaster gave us all the Hershey bars that remained in the chuck wagon and we headed up the mountain. Once the terrain turned to gravel, the going was slower, both due to altitude and poor footing. At one point I told John I could not go further. He wanted to reach the peak, so I stayed back and took a photo when he finally got to the top and waved back at me.

Only it wasn't the peak. When he got back down to me, he said it was just a rise; it would have been impossible to reach the peak that day. And besides, the clouds had started looking ugly. As we made our descent, we could hear the wind howling behind us as the mountain was enshrouded in dark clouds. As it turned out, the rangers had been keeping an eye on us. When we got down to the ranger station, we looked back to see that the mountain was covered with snow. We had stayed just ahead of it all the way down.

I think I still have that photo: a mound of gravel with a tiny figure perched on top. I has been a long time since I saw John. His brother David came to our Scoutmaster's funeral last year, and told me John was really sorry he couldn't come. Me, too. I'd like to know if Scouting proved as beneficial for him as it did for me. Well, that is my tellurian tale for the weekend.