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By Carina Magyar in Trees —

VII: Larch

Where does "larch" come from?

septidi, the 17th of Germinal, Year CCXXXI
A stand of alpine larch. Photo by Damian Markutt / Unsplash

Good morning. Today is septidi, the 17th of Germinal, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le mélèze, a tree with needles that nonetheless isn't an evergreen.

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The larch is the only conifer with needles that turn colors and fall off like leaves. Some Hitler Youth took advantage of this in CXLVI (1938), planting larch trees in the shape of a swastika among a large forest of pines. This was believed to have been as a morale booster for the German pilots, as nobody else would have noticed the shape of the golden needles among the field of green, but nobody documented it until well after World War II had ended. The plot of land being in East Germany, nobody tried to do anything about it until aerial surveys were conducted as part of reunification in CC (1992). Some of the trees were removed then, but the shape was still discernible until the landowner finally felled the remaining larches in CCVIII (2000).

I studied to be a linguist in grad school, briefly, before coming to my senses and pursuing a degree that had real jobs attached to it. I was also dismayed at the granularity of actual linguistic study – listening to tiny noises to describe the various blurts and bleeps the human body is capable of, then cataloguing these and having debates about whether that "ehhhh" was an "ennhhhh" or an "eyeyeyhhh" wasn't my cup of tea. I had thought it would be more etymology.

I love etymology because it's both detective work and historical study. Knowing where words come from is fun, but it's also a way to immerse yourself in the past, finding out that words we've stripped of all explicit connotation used to be colorful metaphors can be really eye opening.

Of course, etymology has its frustrations, too. Sometimes, you just don't know where a word came from, ultimately. Or, if you do, there's a strange chicken-and-egg paradox at its birth. Such appears to be the case with larch.

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VI: Lettuce

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VIII: Hemlock

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