timberrrr

I’m wondering about a tree past its prime. I guess that has to do with how good the wood is to you. Maybe at some time the tree gets so wide that the core, which I assume is the main artery for sucking up the sap, gets kind of hollow or something. Or maybe it begins to lean this way or that, and you don’t want trees falling willy nilly because, well you never know what might happen.

You were unclear about whether when the tree begins to tremble and then begin that slow accelerating plunge to ground if you cry out “Timberrrr.” To me that would be an important part of the fun of chopping down a tree. But maybe you don’t even consider it fun, the way burning the trash in metal can in the middle of the alley was fun when you were just a lad was, and probably among you woodsmen (you probably don’t even call yourselves woodsmen) it is considered a tenderfoot thing to do, the kind of thing some slicker in brand new winter clothes bought from L L Bean would do.

Which got me to thinking why timber. Timber is another word for wood but why yell wood? I have to wonder if timber was just something people yelled, like yahoo, and then it came to also mean the object that was falling.

Were you in history class the day they went over that Norman/Anglo Saxon thing where the Anglo Saxons, as the conquered, called them pigs, whereas the Normans, as the conquerors, and therefore the eaters, called it pork, likewise cows and beef? In Texas, by the way, they call cows beeves.

If I had one of those sweet OEDs I could find out where these words came from but my cheap little paperback doesn’t tell me much. It does hint a little that lumber might have something to do with the Lombards, those guys who used to give the popes so much trouble.

The lines weren’t used to divide the farm fields, they were used to measure them, so that each son got an equal amount of land. Of course now they needed some arithmetic because 1x8 is not the same as 4x5, and then there were all those crazy triangles. Actually until late in the middle ages math was called geometry, because the Greeks got all freaked out by the square root of two and discarded numbers for lines.

But anyway the Sumerians though very clever with their lines and triangles and all, never thought of it as anything more than a gimmick to divide up fields. It was the Greeks who discovered that once you abstracted that piece of vine between two sticks into a perfect straight line with no width, you had entered the world of the mind, and really didn’t need the physical universe anymore. Well you still needed it to eat your pork and to heat your home with wood, but you didn’t need it to think.