Scows and Cows

Growing up in Kansas is about as far from big bodies of water as it's possible to be in the United States.  Even the mighty Mississippi is eight hours away.

Today when I needed to play a word in Words with Friends with the letters s,s,i,i,o,w,c, I decided against playing "cows"  (What's the fun in sticking to boringly familiar words when an edgier word is possible?) and decided to play "scow,"  then checked to make sure that it was a real word--something to do with boats, I thought.  Merriam -Webster says it's "a large flat-bottomed boat with broad square ends used chiefly for transporting bulk material (as ore, sand, or refuse)"

That got me started thinking about all the words for boats I know--certain, however, that I don't know nearly as many as I would if I lived near the sea.  Here are the ones I thought of:

dory
skiff
canoe
dugout
rowboat
motorboat
steamboat
sailboat
houseboat
yacht
ferry
gondola
ship
battleship
aircraft carrier
cutter
tugboat
trawler
barge
oceanliner

If you really know boats, you could probably add many others, (I'd love to hear any you can think of.) and some of my words probably make you chuckle.  I can imagine that I've unknowingly mangled the categorizations, and a rowboat could, for example, also be a canoe, a skiff or a dory.  Some categorizations are likely established by size, some by their power source, some by their function, and some by their construction or design.  Many of those details are lost on me.  This is probably why I should never attempt to write a fictitious story about anyone living in a fishing village.  I'd be sure to get many things wrong.  Ironically though, I've gotten some of those words on the list from children's fiction books I read from our grade school library, so using vocabulary specific to a certain "field" was apparently effective in conveying information.  Other boat words came from the geography books, and still others from mission newsletters or missionary stories.

One of Tristan's little farm picture books obviously suffered from the same malady as my "boat stories" would.  Shane finds it thoroughly disgusting.  This book tells about a little cow that loved to play with all his friends.  All the "cows" in the accompanying picture have very prominent pink mammary glands, apparently so well filled that the teats protrude at some very jaunty angles.  Puh-lease.