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>Webster's dictionary defines swamp as "wet spongy land.". . . >People who study history should >remember that in other eras words often had differing connotations and >meanings. > Yes, but we should also recall regional variations. Webster was Connecticut man, who set out to codify the language as spoken at Yale. I attach the Oxford English Dictionary's entry. Note that the 17th and 18th century sources all originate well south of New England and distinguish between marshes and swamps. More recent definitions, such as Webster's and the OED's lead definition, may be the result of increasing unfamiliarity with swamps, and thus their confusion with marshes. Zach --- 1. a. A tract of low-lying ground in which water collects; a piece of wet spongy ground; a marsh or bog. Orig. and in early use only in the N. American colonies, where it denoted a tract of rich soil having a growth of trees and other vegetation, but too moist for cultivation (see quots. 1741, 1766, 1875). 1624 CAPT. J. SMITH Virginia IV. 163 Some small Marshes and Swamps there are, but more profitable than hurtfull. 1685 PENN Further Acc. Pennsylv. 7 Our Swamps or Marshes yeeld us course Hay for the Winter. 1688 CLAYTON Virginia in Phil. Trans. XVIII. 124 [Musk-rats] build Houses as Beavers do, in the Marshes, and Swamps (as they there call them) by the Water-sides. 1741 P. TAILFER, etc. Narr. Georgia 96 A Swamp is any low watery Place, which is covered with Trees or Canes: They are here of three Sorts, Cypress, River, and Cane Swamps. 1766 STORK Acc. E. Florida 26 note, The word swamp is peculiar to America; it there signifies a tract of land that is sound and good, but by lying low is covered by water. All the forest trees (pine excepted) thrive best in the swamps, where the soil is always rich. 1875 TEMPLE & SHELDON Hist. Northfield, Mass. 21 Swamps.As used by our fathers in the earliest times, this term did not necessarily denote marshy ground; but flat land which from its peculiar location had escaped the ravages of the annual fires set by the Indians, and was covered with an old growth of wood. 1725 DE FOE Voy. round World (1840) 145 Our men..shot a brace of deer, as they were feeding by the side of a swamp or moist ground. 1840 THIRLWALL Greece liii. VII. 20 Ground which the rain had turned into a swamp. 1853 J. H. NEWMAN Hist. Sk. (1873) II. I. iii. 125 The Pontine Marshes, formerly the abode of thirty nations, are now a pestilential swamp. 1880 HAUGHTON Phys. Geog. v. 235 The river Desaguadero..falls into the salt lake and swamps of Aullagas. fig. 1825 LAMB Elia Ser. II. Convalescent, In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness. 1871 MORLEY Carlyle in Crit. Misc. Ser. I. (1878) 173 It has stagnated in the sunless swamps of a theosophy. -- ------------------------------------------------------- Zachary M. Schrag Ph.D. Candidate mailto:zms2@columbia.edu History Department http://www.columbia.edu/~zms2 Columbia University Matthew Gilmore H-DC list co-editor, web editor dc-edit@mail.h-net.msu.edu http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~dclist/ [list website] http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/lists/subscribe.cgi?list=H-DC [subscribe to H-DC] Remember to check http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=lm&list=h-dc for past list messages.
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