Today’s word of the day, thanks to the Words Coach (https://www.wordscoach.com/dictionary) is anfractuous. Pronounced / ænˈfræk tʃu əs /, with the stress on the second syllable, this adjective means “characterized by windings and turnings; sinuous; circuitous” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/anfractuous). Here’s a little side note. In English, multisyllabic words have at least one syllable that is stressed, and that syllable has to be a long syllable. You can sometimes tell a long syllable because it contains a long (or tense) vowel. So why is the stressed syllable in anfractuous pronounced /fre/ (with what in English we call the long a sound). Well, the other way to create a long syllable is to have it followed by two consonants. So we have hoping (pronounced / ˈhoʊ pɪŋ /, with what we call a long o) and hopping (pronounced / ˈhɒp ɪŋ /, with what we call a short [or lax] o). In the second word, the vowel is followed by two consonants.

The word first appears in English in the “1620s, ‘full of windings and turnings,’ from Latin anfractuosus ‘roundabout, winding,’ from anfractus ‘a winding, turning, a bending round,’ especially ‘a circuitous route,’ also figuratively, in rhetoric, ‘circumlocution,’ from am(bi)- ‘around’ (from PIE root *ambhi- ‘around’) + fractus, past participle of frangere ‘to break’ (from PIE root *bhreg- ‘to break’)” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=anfractuous).

So let’s take a little digression into historical linguistics and sound changes. How do we go from Proto-IndoEuropean (PIE: remember that a proto language is one that we have no direct evidence of) *bhreg to Latin fractus? In PIE, the sound *bʰ was an aspirated voiced stop…. In Latin, this sound evolved into a voiceless fricative, represented as f.* The following table illustrates how specific PIE roots containing *bʰ transformed into Latin:

PIE Root             Meaning            Latin Equivalent

*bʰer                   to carry               fero

*bʰel-                  to be strong       fortis

“This transformation reflects a consistent phonological rule where aspirated voiced stops in PIE became voiceless fricatives in Latin. Such changes are crucial for understanding the phonological development of Indo-European languages and their relationships. This phonetic shift is part of a larger set of sound changes that characterize the transition from PIE to its daughter languages, highlighting the complexity and dynamism of linguistic evolution” (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=transformation+of+PIE+*b%CA%B0+to+Latin+f&atb=v421-1&ia=web).

I chose anfractuous in large part because, although I was a professor of English, I read a great deal, and I’m almost 70, I have never heard of this word before today. I cannot think of the last time I ran across a word that I had never heard of.

Today is kind of late, and today’s blog will be kind of short. My wife and I traveled from our home in South Carolina up to Brevard, North Carolina. I won’t go into why, but we have to come up here once a week or so.

Brevard is a beautiful little town nestled in the Western Carolina mountains. It’s definitely a retirement community, at least in part, although there is a small, private college. There are also at least a couple of craft brew places up here.

The hard part of coming to Brevard is the drive. It’s less than two hours, but the last part of it is on US highway 276, commonly called the Caesers Head Road. Caesars Head is a mountain in northern Greenville County, in the Upstate of South Carolina. It has a beautiful view. Right above Caesars Head, maybe 4 minutes away, is the entrance to the Greenville YMCA’s mountain camp, and just beyond that is a chapel called Pretty Place. It deserves the name. It is the venue for many weddings.

So if it’s so beautiful, what’s the problem. It’s the road itself. It’s a US highway with a lot of switchbacks. I’m not a timid drive—not by any stretch—but on this road, when the yellow speed limit sign says 20 mph, you really want to do 20 mph. It’s the only road I’ve ever been on that allows you to look out your driver’s side window and see your own taillights. (That’s an exaggeration.) What I’m trying to say is that the road is anfractuous.

Today’s image is of the chapel Pretty Place, at Camp Greenville in South Carolina (https://truefoundationphotographyblog.com/2021/07/07/pretty-place-chapel-greenville-sc-elopement-photographer/).