Dry rivers and standing rocks

the long version

"Scott Thybony started a file of western words. He ended up with a list of western place names, cowboyisms, American Indian words on permanent loan, Spanish terms, a sprinkling of Arabic, some scientific terms, and an assortment of random coinings, borrowings, and outright expropriations.". "It looks like a reference book and reads like poetry. Readers, teachers, hikers, cartographers, even crossword puzzlers will love it. Neither scholarly nor comprehensive, this is a collection to make you think. It contains paired words like standing rock, grafts like snaggletooth, loners like hoodoo. It recharges the familiar in focusing on a word like yonder, which the author describes poignantly as "compressing the history of the West into a single longing.""--BOOK JACKET.