I’ve written a couple of times in the past about our treks with friends on the National Scenic Ice Age Trail. We’ve been doing short sections (7 to 9 miles) five or six times a summer over the last several years. Some of the trail is pretty rugged, some of it follows paved pathways through cities, some is on country roads, and some of it—like our last two hikes—is on portions of the Sugar River and Badger State bike trails.
The bike trails are on abandoned railroad beds, so they’re easy walking, with almost no grade and on crushed limestone, and therein lies the subject of today’s epistle. It’s easy to pick up a foreign object in your shoe on the crushed limestone paths, but what do you call that little morsel that somehow sneaks into your shoe and works its way down under your heel, making every step a misery? Is it a pebble, a stone or a rock? I’ve heard my compatriots on the trail use all three terms.
I think the distinctions could have something to do with where you live or where you were brought up. Where I grew up, there were little stones and middle-sized stones and big stones, and every year we’d have to pick them up out of the fields. I also spent a lot of time “hitting fungoe” stones with a baseball bat in the gravel driveway.
So, OK, the word-meister in me wants to know: What’s the progression from small to large: pebble, stone, rock, boulder? Dictionary.com says a pebble is “a small, rounded stone, especially one worn smooth by the action of water.” The same source defines a stone as “a small piece of rock, as a pebble.” Look at that: you get stone, rock and pebble all in the same sentence.
Dictionary.com defines rock as “a stone of any size.” A boulder, according to the online dictionary is “a detached and rounded or worn rock, especially a large one.”
Those definitions don’t make significant distinctions among pebble, stone or rock, and they suggest that we can use them synonymously. But I guess you don’t want to get a boulder in your shoe!
Well, all of that leads me to one of my favorite pastimes: the examination of idioms. So today, let’s look at some of the sayings we use in everyday speech that make use of the words pebble, stone or rock.
I could come up with only one idiom for pebble: “You’re not the only pebble on the beach.”
There are quite a few sayings that use rocks as their metaphorical bases. If you have to make a decision between undesirable alternatives, you might be between a rock and a hard place.
We use “on the rocks” several different ways: some people have their drinks on the rocks; a state of ruin or disaster might be referred to as being on the rocks, such as a marriage. Some things are as hard as a rock.
But “stone” has many uses in our idiomatic speech. A heart of stone, a stone’s throw, carved in stone. Just wouldn’t sound right if you substituted pebble for stone, would they? We’re often admonished not to cast the first stone, and we can’t get blood from a stone, can we?
If you have a heart of stone, you might want to kill two birds with one stone. If you leave no stone unturned, and if you live in a glass house, you shouldn’t throw stones. Rolling stones gather no moss, you could run into a stone wall, and some things are set in stone. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. You could be stone cold, stone dead or stone sober, or you could be stoned out of your mind.
All of this led me to rock-paper-scissors, a hand game usually used as a choosing method played by two people, where players simultaneously form one of three shapes with an outstretched hand. A closed fist is a rock, two fingers is scissors, and an open hand is paper.
The “rock” beats scissors, the “scissors” cut paper and the “paper” covers the rock; if both players throw the same shape, the game is tied and you do it again. It’s usually played as a best of three. I read somewhere that the game goes back to ancient China, before the time of Christ. I wonder if they also discussed the differences between rocks and stones?
Categories
