Skip to footer

Readers write: Regional names, collective nouns, and moral injury

Letters to the editor for the Feb. 10, 2020 weekly magazine. Readers discuss naming conventions in the Ozarks, collective nouns, and more.

  • By Monitor readers

Regional names and hogs

I learn so much from Melissa Mohr’s column in the Monitor Weekly. She may like to know that in the January 2020 issue of the Missouri Conservationist, an article about feral hogs in the Missouri Ozarks reads, “MDC and its partners continue to focus efforts on trapping entire sounders, or groups of hogs, at one time.” Add that to the collection of collective nouns.

Also, I have been interested in the Ozark naming practice of making adjectives out of environmental nouns. For instance, we have Clifty Creek (not Cliff Creek), Piney River (both Little and Big Piney Rivers at Fort Leonard Wood) and Piney Mountain, Caney Creek, Brushy Creek and Brushy Knoll, Rocky Creek (not Rock Creek as it’s often seen elsewhere), Grassy Hollow and Lake, Cavey Hollow (for a valley with multiple caves), and Woody Ridge (not Wood Ridge). 

Douglas County is regularly referred to as “wooly” or “woolly” country for its thickness of brambles, sumac, poison ivy, brush, stunted trees, etc. I can circumscribe that part of Missouri with such terms. Such features were named, of course, by the early settlers from Kentucky, Tennessee, and western Virginia. By the way, we have no stones in the Ozarks, only rocks. I’ve never heard of a stone wall, only rock wall.

Walter A. Schroeder
Columbia, Missouri

Collective nouns

As each issue of the Monitor Weekly arrives, I look forward to reading Melissa Mohr’s column. Just about the time I read “A ‘murder of crows’ and other collective nouns” in the Nov. 18, 2019, issue, three sets of family members – my children and a grandson – visited me within a 10-day period, with only a one-day overlap between two of them. After they’d all left I felt I’d had a “flurry of family.” Delightful!

Elisabeth Seaman
Mountain View, California

Bird migrations

The Dec. 9, 2019, Monitor Weekly included two fine letters of appreciation for Ms. Mohr’s columns on collective nouns. But neither mentioned the corroborative photo spread on page 4 of the Nov. 18, 2019, issue titled “A murmuration of starlings.” Bingo!

Oliver Hirsh
Klippinge, Denmark

Moral injury

Thank you for the Dec. 2, 2019, Monitor Weekly cover story, “Healing the moral injury of war.” This subject has been much neglected, unfortunately. I find it ironic that some of the most touching things I read about duty to God versus duty to country are in military publications.

John Stettler
Dallas

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Readers write: Regional names, collective nouns, and moral injury
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Readers-Respond/2020/0208/Readers-write-Regional-names-collective-nouns-and-moral-injury
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe