More thoughts on what to write

I’m getting on quite well with my self imposed writing challenge. I’m on number three of a randomly generated word list, and after ‘last’ and ‘donkey’, word 3 is ‘spiffy’ which a dictionary tells me means stylish, attractive, smartly dressed. I haven’t imposed a schedule on my challenge, only that I use the words on my list in order, and after ‘spiffy’ which is progressing quite well, I have ‘lumber’.  A couple of thoughts immediately sprung to mind, lumber as in to move ponderously, and lumber as in ‘lumber room’. It’s just struck me that lumber can also mean burdened  in a physical or personal sense.  Where does the word come from, what’s its origin?

I went to my favourite word site http://etymonline.com, and straight away, first sentence was another meaning to lumber which I’m irritated I didn’t think of – lumber as in lumberjack, lumber as in the wood lumberjacks produce from chopping down trees. I wonder how many people like me, reading the word lumberjack immediately have Monty Python spring into their heads with their performance of “I’m a lumberjack, and I’m ok, I sleep all night and work all day!” 

Back to the word ‘lumber’.  On the word site there’s quite a complicated and not altogether clear explanation of the origin of the word. Maybe lumber was disused bits of furniture, maybe rough-hewn planks, or maybe it comes from to move awkwardly – and I know from experience, moving old bits of furniture and rough planks can be very awkward! Maybe it was something to do with the Lombards, a Germanic people (I thought they were Italian, but no – the German Lombards conquered what is now Lombardia/Lombardy) How this association arose, I’m really not clear despite reading the explanation – but Lombardian immigrants to London often had pawnshops and would have held the furniture desperate people had pawned. The pawnshop owners (pawnshops sometimes called lumber-houses) would have had rooms (apparently, I’m not at all convinced by this) which held the pawned furniture which became known as lumber and were stored in lumber-rooms.

At some point in the complicated journey of the word ‘lumber’ it was associated with roughly sawn pieces and planks of wood. The men who worked so hard chopping down trees and making planks (maybe while wearing women’s clothes – joke from Monty Python) were known as lumberjacks, and by the early nineteenth century they lived in lumber camps while out in the forest wilds, the timber was delivered to lumber mills where it was processed.

I mentioned earlier that heaving round great unwieldy pieces of timber and furniture must be awkward and difficult and I discovered that lumbering as a verb came from that activity. But no! I’m wrong! I didn’t read the whole explanation but just jumped randomly in at what seemed a good place. To lumber around as in being clumsy and ungainly has a much older history – probably seven hundred or so years ago! It probably comes from a Swedish sense of walking slowly – of lumbering along at a snail’s pace. There may also be a connection with the idea of being lame or crippled in some way. And finally, I have come across the delightful word, lumbersome – which is somewhat like this rambling explanation. 

This has certainly given me more thoughts on what to write for ‘lumber’, once I have finished spiffy!

My featured image is of Dark Hedges in Northern Ireland, now famous through appearing in ‘Game of Thrones’.