#catawba

[vintagepipemen]

David Setzer, director of public relations at Catawba College, 1967.

[unteriors]

Sunrise Beach Road, Catawba, North Carolina.

[kimberly40]

"May morning

I rise early to greet your cool mist

Broken soon by the sun's face

Lighting your grace

May morning

Your bright hue is refreshing

Waltzing in after gentle spring showers

Having kissed your flowers

May morning

How quickly you pass from us

Slipping quietly through summer's soft portal

Grieving both angel and mortal"

~'May Morning,' by The Homespun Wife

(Pictured is the Catawba River in Marion, North Carolina in McDowell County)

[jolieeason]

Bookish Travels: February 2025 Destinations

I saw this meme on It’s All About Books and decided to do it once a month. Many thanks to Yvonne for initially posting this!! This post is what it says: Places I travel to in books each month. Books take you to places you would never get to. Please let me know if you have read these books or traveled to these areas. Countries I visited the most: United States, Canada States/Provinces I…

[millipedereads]

Yaupon: a quick linguistics rabbithole

Time for a niche linguistics post. Join me through a stumble though some etymological weeds.

Yaupon (scientific name: Ilex vomitoria) is a species of holly, growing in the coastal plains from Virginia to Texas, and is the only plant native to North America that contains caffeine (other than the closely related I. casine which has a smaller range south of yaupon's in Florida and nearby Caribbean islands as well as a lower percentage of caffeine). If you google it, you're given the factoid that there are 4 caffeinated holly species- which also doesn't include I. casine- the others growing in South America (yerba maté (I. paraguariensis), guayusa (I. guayusa), and té o’ maté (I. tarapotina). Despite my love of tea, coffee, and tisane, I've not had yerba maté and can't give you a comparison of the flavors.

Yaupon was used by Indigenous groups in the southeast for medicinal and ceremonial uses, and would induce vomiting, which gives it its Latin name vomitoria. Ilex is the genus for holly, but in Latin it referred to a species of oak whose leaves superficially look similar to holly (in size, are evergreen, have spines; or is better to say that holly looks superficially like the so-called 'ilex'? the one rabbithole I did not descend into...yet).

It's common name is taken from the Catawban word yą́pą [jãpã], where yą- is tree and pą is leaf, possibly implying a high status for the plant to get such a generalized name. Colonists would have been introduced to this plant early on, as it's a plant given to acknowledge and welcome guests.

Catawban is a Siouan language - considered extinct since the death of the last fluent native speaker in 1959. The endonym for Catawbas is Ye Iswąˀre [je iswãʔre] (or "yeh is-WAH h’reh," as per the Catawba Nation website), meaning 'people of the river,' particularly the Catawba river between the present-day Carolinas. Their name has also been transcribed as Issa, Iswa, and Esaw. The name Catawba itself comes from katapu, which is the fork of a river. There is a program under the Cultural Center of the Catawba Nation to support revitalization and maintenance at https://catawbalanguage.org/ that you can also check out.

All the other nations and tribes in the Souian language group on the East coast also only have extinct languages among them, though they have their own efforts at compiling dictionaries and so on. Living Siouan languages include but aren't limited to Apsáalooke (Crow), Dakhóta, Lakhota, Quapaw, and Hocąk (Ho-Chunk).

Aforementioned I. casine takes its name from the Timucua work for yaupon. The Timucua were multiple groups that spoke languages within the same language family in present-day North Florida, but the name was taken from the French recording of an exonym of one of the chiefdoms for another. I. casine's common name is dahoon holly. Dahoon itself has unknown etymological origins, don't know what's up with that.

Though uncaffeinated, other holly species have also been used for tisane elsewhere. In China, a common ingredient of 苦丁茶 (kǔdīngchá / Kuding Tea / Bitter Nail Tea) is I. kaushue, a holly grown in the south. This scientific name is not from Latin but its Chinese name 扣樹 (in standard Mandarin: kòushù, in Cantonese: kau3syu6).

Yaupon's name in Chinese is 代茶冬青. 冬青 is the word for holly while the most sense I can make of 代茶 is 'stands in for tea,' perhaps a way of translating tisane.

[hittheclubstep]

[ljgreenhope]

Marami ang bungkos at malalaki ang butil ng Catawba grapes. Red Cardinal umusbong na.

[mothmiso]

Blue Ridge Parkway Early June (2) (3) by Craig Wililams

Via Flickr:

(1) View from Wolf Mtn Overlook. (2) Catawba Rhododendron, view from Graveyard Fields Overlook. (3) Distant view of Looking Glass Mtn from Pounding Mill Overlook.     

[midas-touch-illustration]

CATAWBA

[vintagepipemen]

Coy Ludwig, a student at Catawba College, 1961.

[southernsolarpunk]

Check this out! Now do this for the rest of the tribes in South Carolina

[middleland]

Catawba State Park (2) by clarinetgirl

Via Flickr:

(1) I chose CineStill 800T film recipe to enhance the bluish tint of the ice, but it ended up being far bluer than I wanted. This is the best I could do at restoring the image. The rest of the photos from the day are Classic Chrome. (2) Ice fishing on Lake Erie.     

[faguscarolinensis]

Rhododendron catawbiense / Catawba Rhododendron at the Sarah P. Duke Gardens at Duke University in Durham, NC

[kitthew]

genealogy is suuuuuch a boring and confusing and stressful hobby until all of a sudden u find something that makes soooooo much sense and all the dumb weird pieces start fitting together and u feel like ur meeting urself for the very first time!

[chaoticdesertdweller]

Catawba Valley, Virginia

📸 DJF