A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1068 entries
albatross
A seabird of the family Diomedeidae, built entirely around the wind. The wandering albatross has the longest wingspan of any living bird at around three and a half meters. It can lock its wings open at the shoulder so that holding them out costs it almost nothing. Albatrosses cross thousands of kilometers on a single foraging trip, sleep on the wing, come to land only to breed, and can live past sixty.
Etymology
A word that arrived by mistake. Portuguese and Spanish sailors called the pelican alcatraz, from either Arabic al-ghattās, “the diver,” or Portuguese alcatruz, the bucket on a water wheel, from Arabic al-qādūs — a bucket being a fair account of a pelican’s pouch. English seamen carried the name south into latitudes that have no pelicans, fastened it to a much larger and entirely unrelated bird, and along the way the spelling drifted toward Latin albus, white.
Notes
The albatross as a burden you have to carry is recent — attested from the 1930s — and comes from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), where the mariner shoots the bird and is made to wear the corpse. It’s worth remembering that in the poem the albatross is good luck right up until he kills it.