Day of the Everlasting Moraine

 

"nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time" - James Joyce (from Finnegan's Wake)

I had always assumed the name of Georgia's Oconee River derived from a Cherokee or possibly Muscogee word. The double-e's at the end resonate with other names like Chattahoochee, Apalachee, and, well, Cherokee and Muscogee, and the name is an anglicized form of a native word meaning “born from water.” 

One of the things I like about traveling through America is hearing the echoes of the indigenous languages in place names - Patchogue and  Hauppauge and Ronkonkoma on Long Island, Tucumcari and Maricopa and Ticaboo in the Southwestern desert, and Clackamas and Tucannon and even Seattle in the Pacific Northwest. It's like the ghosts of the First People live on in the language of the current inhabitants.

When I came across "the stream Oconee" on the first page of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, that most Irish of novels by that most Irish of novelists, I started to suspect that the river was actually named after a stream in Ireland - after all, the Oconee runs past the town of Dublin, Georgia. Certainly, Joyce couldn't be referencing a Georgia river on the first page of his monumental book, and by a happenstance of linguistic coincidence, "oconee" also means "alas" in Irish.

But he was.  Dublin, Georgia was founded on the Oconee River by an Irishman, Jonathan Sawyer, who named it after his home town with the motto "Doubling all the time."  Joyce is signaling that he's talking about the American Dublin and not the Irish capital by referencing Tom Sawyer, here slurred as "topsawyer." "topsawyer's rocks" is considered a reference to his testicles.

A gorgio is a name given by the travelling Roma people to someone who is not a Roma, that is, a gentile or a person who lives in a house and not in a tent. Similarly, a mumper is a half-bred Roma. The true-bred Roma scorned the mumpers, the road-folk who sought cover at night under a roof.

Joyce is basically dissing the Georgia Dublin, corrupting its "Doubling all the time" motto to imply that the founder had given rise to a population of half-breed Roma gorgios and mumbers. "Nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time" is establishing a time before the settlement, or at least the rise to prominence of, the United States to the book's events.

That's a lot of exposition for one clause in the second paragraph of a lengthy novel, which doesn't get any easier to read after that. But I'll give him this - it's fun to say out loud.  Try it (you'll like it).  I wish there was a way to fit "doublin their mumper" into a conversation, but I can't think on any way to do it. Later in that same paragraph, Joyce says "rot a peck of pa's malt." I have no idea what that means, but it does sound like a great nonsense phrase I can fit into some future conversation. "Well, rot a peck of pa's malt if it ain't my old friend, Susan." 

Anyway, none of this is what I had meant to talk about. Today is Day of the Everlasting Moraine in the Universal Solar Calendar, which got me to thinking that way back before topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time, there was a great global glaciation that left its impact all over the northern latitudes. Evidence includes features like the Ronkonkoma moraine on Long Island.

There are no moraines in Georgia.  Moraines are basically the garbage pile bulldozed by the leading edge of glaciers, and the glaciers didn't come this far south. The only evidence we have of the great Pleistocene glacial events here in Georgia are old shorelines still etched into the soft sediments of the Coastal Plain. When much of Earth's water resources was tied up in frozen glaciers, the shoreline was lower than present (not as much water in the ocean). But in the warmer interglacial periods, some of which were warmer than present climates, there was more water in the ocean and shorelines were higher, even reaching up to Dublin and beyond.  Everything to the south and southeast was undersea, and Dublin once boasted oceanfront property, and rot a peck of pa's malt if you knew that before, you mumper.