For some time, I’ve been in a fight with the dictionary. I make a word, and the dictionary says, “NOPE! Go fish!” but then I use the word anyway, because no one’s in charge of me, but me. In real life, this plays itself out a little bit in jocular arguments with my mother, who is what is called a “prescriptivist,” someone who believes the language is mainly fixed, and that there is proper usage and improper usage. I come from the “descriptivist” school, which basically holds that the language is what we say it is. I feel a natural aversion to rules, especially when they bust my flow.
And so, ‘sanctuarity.’ It’s the quality of a place that feels safe and inviting.
Just this last Friday, we drove out to the spot, the one wedged in the corner of the two highways, both feeling tired, or ‘Fridayed‘ as we like to say. That’s another word neither Merriam nor Webster cares for. The sun blared down on the sand and gravel parking lot. We unloaded and pushed off despite ourselves, grinding our way up the fire road to the trail head proper.
This is the easy way, the first left, and then a slow climb up the hill. The sun reaches back between the trees there and licks at your heels. You’ve been pedaling for fewer than five minutes, but the first tingle of perspiration rises on the back of your neck, until you reach the shade line, a distinct demarcation in chiaroscuro.
Suddenly everything shifts from warm to cool. The squint leaves your eyes. Your body relaxes. The trees dance gently in the breeze. All is sanctuarity.
This is a transient quality. It comes and goes. This patch of woods, in high summer, can feel pretty hostile, the cicadas at fever pitch, like it’s their job to conjure the heat, darts of searing sunlight through every break in the canopy. Winter, too, with masses of roots knit together by melt ice, the light blue and riven with cold.
But last Friday, despite being Fridayed as f*&k, we made it to the line of sanctuarity, and it was like the woods were rooting for us. We made the top of the first hill and rocketed down the other side, crossed a couple of wooden bridges and then slithered up the next to where the ride really starts, a grove of pine, a narrow, technical ridge line, then past some abandoned cars, and into the flow of the thing.
The dictionary (and my mom) would argue that the word sanctuary, which has eschewed alternate forms since it was first used in the 14th century, is fully fit for purpose. You can pepper it with modifiers and get what you want out of it. To say the woods are a sanctuary is fine. To say the woods can be a sanctuary sometimes gets closer. To say we arrived at sanctuarity feels rightest to me.
I like most descriptivist words. One that I have been hearing a lot lately that bugs the hell out of me though: comfortability. As in, “He’s been searching for more comfortability from his suspension.” Please stop. Just leave it at comfort. Please.
I’m somewhere in the middle ground between you and your mom on the dynamism and evolution of language. In no way do I think it’s fixed but I do believe changes and additions should be subject to a reasonably stringent vetting process or at least given enough time before becoming mainstream. Shared meaning is more important than dynamism to me.
Either way, I can definitely agree that riding bikes provides solace and refuge from the sun and also from seemingly constant torment and anxiety of life in the time we live in. I’m not quite sure where I’d be without it.