#919 Land Parts

Lately it seems like all the local news stories are like a 3rd grade class on basic geography. Here in the great northwest we have it all. Like mountains, some of them volcanoes, some of which have craters and domes. And lakes, rivers, and most importantly, the Puget Sound.
“What is a sound?” visitors ask me.
“What have you heard?” I ask innocently.
Eventually I reel off the dictionary definition: a] a long broad inlet of the ocean generally parallel to the coast, or b] a long passage of water connecting two larger bodies (as a sea with the ocean) or separating a mainland and an island.
It’s also the air bladder of a fish.
Lately, we’ve heard about a couple of more exotic land parts in our local news—the Estuary and the Isthmus. The estuary stories are about reconverting Capitol Lake to its original riverine status. Way back when, before south sound sewers and such, we used to let everything run down and out the chutes of the Deschutes River and wash into the sound.
The tidal ebb and flow brought lots of interesting smells to the noses of the legislators up on the hill and the lovely reflection of the capitol dome we now have was a sodden, fetid, mud flat. The shifting patterns of the river’s outflow braided the mud pools bubbling with cholera, typhus, and lazily swimming brown trout.
An estuary.
The estuary flowed past that other piece of geography we’ve been hearing misnamed a lot. The isthmus. Because as one local dignitary pointed out, nothing can flow through an isthmus. An isthmus is by definition an unbroken narrow stretch of land that connects two larger landmasses.
When the river and the tide flowed, that area in Olympia was a peninsula.
And it still is, as only a mechanical lock inhibits the flow.
I think some folks just like to challenge us radio people with the word isthmus. You can’t seem to say it without affecting a lisp.
The trick is to leave out the TH sound altogether. So if you spell it phonetically you could say, quite seasonably, that it’s beginning to look a lot like is-mus.
America, ya gotta love it.