guzzle (guz’l), n I. n. 4. A drain or ditch; sometimes, a small stream. Also called a guzzen. Halliwell. [Prov. Eng.]
Or why books are so much better than the internet.
It showed up a few times in Franklin Burroughs’s John Burroughs Medal winner, Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay. For instance, “In May when the wild rice and bullrushes are just stubble on the mudflats, (carp) become active, feeding up into guzzles as the tide rises, fanning out as it covers the flats.”
The context reveals that a guzzle is something that maintains some amount of water even when the tide is out, but how it is distinguished from a runnel, stream, or rivulet was hard to tell. The lessor of the four? Or perhaps somewhere in the middle. Certainly not larger than a stream or a creek. But what exactly, I could not tell. More important what are the origins of the word?
Later I gathered it may be bigger than a runnel, a word I had heard before. I had read about eels inhabiting tiny runnels “of water not deep enough to cover their backs.”
The dictionary that comes baked into my Mac wasn’t much help. Although it’s never great on etymology it does have a pretty good thesaurus. Good enough that you can usually back out distinctions in meaning from the collections of synonyms and antonyms
The on line dictionaries were terrible. Able only to give just the shortest of shrifts to the possibility of guzzling or gobbling food, “gourmandizing.” But really the on line sources just wanted to tell me about booze. A fine topic in the right context but pretty tedious once ads for shot glasses and what-not started rolling in to crowd out what you really want to know.
The internet is hell (he wrote on the internet).
But then the unabridged Century Dictionary, 1914 edition, in 10 volumes with companion volumes on proper names and geographic names, graces a full shelf and half in my home. It is old and looks impressive. You can find it listed for sale for two-hundred dollars or so. One-fifty seems like the low end of what current owners hope for. My practice, if selling, would be to aim even lower. But at three feet of shelving and weighing in at eighty-four pounds it is difficult to see the margin. After shipping and the hassle of packaging are considered, the effort and cost of getting it to a buyer make the curb seem like a likely option once the personal representatives of my estate arrive on the scene.
But now, I have another good reason to just let it sit there until the next time the internet fails me:
guzzle (guz’l), n I. n. 4. A drain or ditch; sometimes, a small stream. Also called a guzzen. Halliwell. [Prov. Eng.]
Postscripts
I. As it turns out Frank Burroughs was equally curious about the word guzzle and had traced a similar path to find its meaning, though he consulted the thirteen volume Oxford English Dictionary, along with the four volume Dictionary of American Regional English.
Had I had the patience to read all the way to the end of Confluence before embarking on this search I would have learned Frank had done the research for me. In an essay near the end of Confluence Frank writes about what he calls OGL, or Old Growth Language. A glossary of sorts tracking the origins and use of regional language around Merrymeeting Bay. OGL, he writes is “something deeply rooted in a location that hasn’t been drastically disturbed for a long time; something less frequently met in the present than in the past, and that may not be met with at all in the future.”
It is difficult not to draw parallels between the loss of habitat at Merrymeeting Bay and the loss of language.
II. Frank Burroughs has a new book out: The View From Here; Reflections on the Deep North and the Wild East. This new collection includes brief essays originally published in Down East magazine's "Room With a View" column and a selection of previously uncollected essays. Ranging from coastal South Carolina to Northern Quebec, and from his childhood to the present, these essays meet at the intersection of human history, natural history, and biography.
Frank read just recently at Curtis Memorial Library from one essay about work he had had as a young man in forestry in Northern Quebec.
III. A Room With a View in Down East is currently written by my sister, Mary Pols. I should have gotten a photo of the two of them together.
IV. Down East Books had had plans to re-release Confluence in August 2025 but those plans have evidently been put on the back burner, which is a shame. It is a book that everyone who loves the natural world, language, and language about the natural world should explore.
V. You can read more of my thoughts on Confluence, The John Burroughs Award, nature writing, Rachel Carson, Merrymeeting Bay and the Androscoggin River here.
