To a visiting botanist, prairie is a vastness of grasses, and of xerophytes, plants adapted to intermittent drought. To a homesteading Canadian newcomer in 1876, prairie might have meant “the first land anyone in my family ever owned.” Later such a drylander might decide to sow a domesticated grass called wheat. To a writer like W. O. Mitchell, born at Weyburn, Saskatchewan, prairie might resound in his heart like the great chord of words that opens his 1947 novel Who Has Seen the Wind: “Here was the least common denominator of nature, the skeleton requirements simply, of land and sky, Saskatchewan prairie. It lay wide around the town, stretching tan to the far line of the sky, clumped with low buck brush and wild rose bushes, shimmering under the late June sun and waiting for the unfailing visitation of wind, gentle at first, barely stroking the long grasses and giving them life.”
FIRST CANADIAN USE OF THE WORD Who first applied the word "prairie" to the rolling grasslands in the middle of North America? Canoe-stiff French adventurers dubbed it, early in the eighteenth century. Rough explorers they were, China-hungry, gold-thirsty, fur-crazy, paddling the continental interior by unknown lakes and rivers. They had no exact French word to label the grassy plains whose immensity and reach had startled their sense of geographic proportion, based as it was on the populated density of their native Europe. But there was a French word for grazing land, sometimes used to describe dry scrub in the south of France. Prairie ‘grassland’ had entered Old French by A.D. 1180. Its first meaning in French was pasturage, any field with plants that were suitable fodder for domestic animals.
ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORD PRAIRIE La prairie may have arrived directly from a Late Latin phrase like terra prataria ‘meadow-land.’ Compare such borrowing in other Romance languages where Italian has prateria and Spanish pradera. The classical Latin root was pratum ‘meadow.’ But pratum had come into French earlier as pré ‘meadow’ and so French prairie may simply be an extension of it, for -erie was a noun suffix, giving *préerie the sense of ‘a considerable area of meadow-like land suitable for pasturing cattle and sheep.’
SURNAMES BASED ON PRAIRIE A few hundred years later, when French surnames began reaching some of their final forms, a person whose house was beside a pré‚ might have become known as Jacques Dupré (Jack of the meadow, meaning a founding ancestor whose house was beside or in a meadow), giving one of the commoner modern French surnames with continental French regional variations like Dupré, Duprat (note retention of the original Latin t), and Dupraz. Once the name reached the New World , we see American variants like the original Louisiana spellings Dupree and Dupry. Famous bearers of the name include French organist and composer Marcel Dupré‚ and the British cellist Jacqueline Dupré. These surnames are semantic equivalents of English ones like Meadow and Meadows. Because people all over the world have dwelt beside meadows, it is a common surname in many languages. Consider the German surname Auerbach ‘stream through a meadow’ or German Wieser ‘meadow-dweller.’ Russian has Lugov ‘descendant or son of the meadow (owner).’
PRAIRIE & THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Canadian French produced a diminutive of prairie, prairillon ‘a small tract of grassland,’ which enjoyed a brief vogue in Canadian English, sometimes spelled prairion. In France, Bastille-stormers took up prairie too. French Revolutionists wanted everything ancient and stinking of noblesse to be dumped, including the old calendar. They made up a clumsy new one that lasted a short time. The ninth month of the Revolutionary calendar, which fell between May 20 and June 18, was called Prairial ‘meadow-month.’ In the third year of the Republic June 8, 1795 appeared as 20 prairial, an III. Oh yes, it was a really new month name, if you consider one thousand years old to be new. The new months of the French Revolutionary calendar were named as follows:
MEAD MONATH Prairial in fact was a Republican scholar's sneaky translation of one of the earliest month names in proto-Germanic languages. Even among the Anglo-Saxons one name for what became the month of July was mead-monath or meadow-month, the time when northern meadows throve. CANADIAN PRAIRIE PHRASES Back home, where the buffalo roamed, later Canuck sodbusters were coining a variety of phrases:
Bald-headed prairie - rolling plains with no trees Prairie itch - a dermatitis produced by contact with nasty micro-organisms called fresh-water polyps of the genus Hydra found in prairie potholes, ponds, and ditches. In W. O. Mitchell's Jake and the Kid (1961) a character "had the measles and the prairie itch once and the mumps on both sides." Prairie squint - from too many long days in the sun harvesting that yellow grain. Did you know that Estevan, Saskatchewan , has more hours of sunshine than any other city in Canada , 2,537 hours per annum on average? Prairie wool - wild fodder for sheep consisting of graminaceous goodies like spear-grass, bunch-grass, and buffalo-grass.
Prairie lily - The official floral emblem of Saskat-chewan, Lilium philadelphicum, the red range-lily aka the western red lily is now almost on the endangered species list. This lily is a fussy breeder and a shy little hider in tall grass except when it explodes into red, yellow and orange bloom early in a prairie June. 2005 is the 100th anniversary of Saskatchewan's provincial status and 200,000 red lily seedlings were germinated in government greenhouses, almost half to be given away to Saskatchewan gardeners to promote the plant's spread. Given its proper nook the lily will grow in many Saskatchewan places south of the provincie's boreal forest line. A book-length study of this interesting lily appears in May: Prairie Phoenix by biologist Bonnie Lawrence and Saskatoon botanist Anna Leighton. Prairie oyster - the name of the best cure in the West for a hangover: open a fresh egg, sprinkle with pepper, drop it into a double shot of rye, drink at once while invoking any hovering deity. Bacchus may deign to quell the throb. Prairie oysters is also a common name for calves' testicles breaded and fried up as a western treat.
©2005 William Gordon Casselman
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.................................................................................. Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day
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