ALONG THE WAY

a short hike through Arroyo Lingo

WORDS ARE MY HOBBY as well as the tools of my vocation, and there are so many of them to know about that it's a daunting enterprise. During my childhood, when the Western movie was in its ascendancy, I saw hundreds and hundreds of mesas and buttes on movie screens, but it wasn't until earlier today that it finally occurred to me to wonder what precisely the difference is between the two. Having done a little research, I've got something of a fix on it, although I can't help thinking that the difference between a mesa and a butte is something I'll be eternally fated to forget, like the difference between a stalagmite and a stalactite and a schlemiel and a schlimazel. Two weeks on a troop ship helped me to remember the difference between port and starboard, although at the moment I'm not sure I recall the difference.

My American Heritage dictionary says that a mesa is a broad, flat-topped elevation with one or more clifflike sides, common in the Southwest United States, and that the word is Spanish, meaning “table.” A butte is defined as a hill with sloping sides and a flat top that rises abruptly from the surrounding area, taken from a French word meaning “mound behind targets.” I can't help wondering—what targets? But I don't want to get lost in digression.

Fortunately, the dictionary offers a photograph for each word, which suggests buttes are abbreviated mesas. Some mesas in Monument Valley are beauts, but I don't know if any buttes are as pretty.

Also, I've never been to Mesa, Arizona, but I have been through Butte, Montana, both of which presumably have at least a couple of members of MENSA. It is interesting to note that in Mexico the organization MENSA is known instead as MESA, because the word mensa is a slang term that loosely translates as “stupid woman.” I'm not a member of MENSA, but I have been called a mensch by a Jewish friend who may or may not be a schlemiel or a schlimazel. The Latin word mensa, incidentally, also means “table,” and ain't that another beaut? I may end up wishing I'd never delved into this. After all the Roadrunner cartoons I've seen, it never occurred to me to wonder whether my heroically persistent role model, Wile E. Coyote, was falling off a mesa or a butte. And when Richard Dreyfuss made his pilgrimage to Devil's Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I never wondered if it's a butte or a mesa, and I doubt that the extraterrestrials did, either. My dictionary photos lead me to conclude that Devil's Tower is a butte, but then, I'm not a member of MENSA, so don't quote me. Now consider the synchronicity attending the fact that there's a word, mesa, in Malayaham, the language spoken in Kerala, the southern tip of India, that also means “table.” And ponder the fact that there's an area in Arizona, called Table Mesa. Table Table? Well, there's Walla Walla, Baden Baden and Pago Pago—places so nice apparently they named them twice. Then there are Black Mesa Butte in Utah and Middle Butte Mesa in Idaho, whose names smack of linguistic miscegenation, with blurred nuances thrown into the bargain, not to mention a soupçon of redundancy. This may be a case for someone from MENSA.

Moreover, there's a joker in this deck, namely the word plateau—that elevated area representing the next highest level on a game show. The word plateau comes from the French word “platter.” So flatness remains the dominant characteristic in all mesas, buttes and plateaus. My dictionary describes a plateau as a “tableland,” presumably a land that would be the natural habitat of platters. Curiouser and curiouser, in the words of Lewis Carroll. And, incidentally, while they may not have mesas or buttes in England, they do have Stonehenge, which is more like an ity bitty pinnacle, which is surely some sort of geological kissin' cousin.

Emilee Riley, a teacher in Salt Lake City, may have the best overview of the whole thing. She has written about her students: “The largest plateau is called a plateau. To help them remember it I called it 'Papa Plateau!' The next size is a mesa, therefore 'Mommy Mesa' Next, 'Baby Butte,' and finally 'Pee Wee Pinnacle. “ Got it! Also, For a limited time SAVE 50% to 70% on these books

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