Hello Word Fans! You’re going to love today’s Dictionary.com Word of the Day. It is “Cloudland”. It literally means “the sky” or a region of unreality, imagination, etc.; dreamland.
“Hmmm. Okay Kat. I guess it is an oKAY word, but worthy of love? I think you might be stretching it a bit.” (I’m smiling as I play this imaginary conversation in my head.)
Well, you don’t think I would leave you with such a bland, blah, blah, blah definition without giving you some juicy rest of the story info to write home about, now…do you? That would just be mean. And besides, I guarantee you will learn to love this word! (not to mention it is February the month of LOVE! :))
Being a Gemini, an air sign, and a bit of a word nerd, I am often accused of living in Cloudland; not specifically of course, but in oh so many words. Ah but, I digress. I do that a lot, hence the Cloudland references. I do think I would love living there. In Cloudland, that is, because it is actually a real place in the upper Western corner of Georgia. You probably didn’t know that, unless of course you are a nature-loving, canyon-hiking, waterfall-scaping, spelunking, yurt enthusiast. Then you might know all about Cloudland Canyon. Here’s a LINK if you’d like to visit Cloudland one day. 🙂
Oh, but there is more! Cloudland entered the English language in the early 1800’s but it has a distant Greek cousin based on the word, Nephelokokkȳgía, which means CloudCuckooLand. Its origin is traced to Aristophanes’ 414BC comedic play, The Birds, referring to the realm which separates the gods from mankind. It’s an interesting political allegory that includes such things as building walls, religion, power struggles, the creation of self-serving laws, and ultimately, the fact that a perfect world does not exist. In fact, it is said that anyone who is naïve enough to believe in such a place is a “Cloudcuckoolander”!
In the 20th and 21st Century cloudcuckooland has been used quite liberally by various politicians and big thinkers to include: Margaret Thatcher, Newt Gingrich, Paul Krugman, Imran Khan, a Pakistani sportsman turned politician, Henry Wallace, US Secretary of Agriculture in the 1930’s, and Yuri N. Maltsev, an Austrian economist and economic historian. Read more about it HERE.
So there you have it. I must admit I wouldn’t mind being a cloudlander myself, sans the “cuckoo” part. I’ve always fancied the idea of flying like the birds. I could use a bird’s eye view these days. The view from the ground lately rather cuckoo!
Dreams of Cloudland
In my wildest dreams
I sprout magnificent wings
and take to cloudland.
~kat – 3 February 2017
Have a happy weekend. 🙂
like mercury colliding... 