This is a photograph of Chattanooga, my hometown. That mountain over yonder is Lookout Mountain, and that's how far away yonder is. At least in this example. Yonder means "over there," so distance varies. "Way down yonder in the land of cotton" is not necessarily within sight of the singer. Flying "into the wild blue yonder" is a rather amorphous place — how high is the sky?
I've only used "
yonder" once before on this book blog, though I wrote about the word in 2010 on my word blog:
How far is yonder? That's the blog where I write about words. At the top, I say that
Joyful Noiseletter is "an exuberant newsletter to myself about joyful things, like words, which I enjoy."
2 comments:
I love the bridges!
The bridge on the left is the Walnut Street Bridge, built in 1891. It was too old and narrow for modern traffic and was closed to motor vehicles in 1978. In the 1990s, it was reopened as a walking bridge. Google Walnut Street Bridge Chattanooga to read about it.
The middle bridge is the Market Street Bridge, still very much in use from the downtown area on the other side of the river to North Chattanooga (now called the North Shore) on the near side of the river. (It's also in Wikipedia.)
The bridge on the right is the Olgiati Bridge (also in Wikipedia) that was completed in 1959, the year I married. It's the "highway" that can whisk folks to the many communities north of the river ("this" side, in other words).
There's another bridge that crosses the river east of this picture, which is upriver to the left. Chickamauga Dam was built by the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide electricity, and was dedicated by FDR about four months after I was born in 1940. The Wilkes T. Thrasher Bridge was constructed high above the dam and opened in 1955. (Also in Wikipedia, as you can probably guess.)
There! Now I've shared a history lesson with a history teacher! LOL. Let's call it "History of the Bridges." Minimal history, but still..... To be a full (or fuller?) history, I'd have to include the military bridge that was there during the Civil War, but later washed away. But you aren't THAT interested in my hometown's bridges.
If I included more about the Civil War, I'd be going full circle back to that "mountain over yonder" that was the point of this blog post. That's Lookout Mountain, the location of the "Battle Above the Clouds" that took place in 1863. The Battle of Chickamauga was slightly south of town. Notice that's also the name of the dam.
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