I looked up “gossamer” some years ago, and I was charmed. But when I prepared to post a piece with that title recently, and searched for a picture on Google Images, no geese came up. I could feel the original sense being lost. I figure it won’t hurt to record it here.

“Gossamer” is an elision of the words “goose summer.” When flocks of geese fly all at once, at each end of their season of migration, so many feathers take the air that the atmosphere is littered with fluff. It’s as if all of us shook winter-used blankets out, in the sun, all at once: the dust motes would prevail around us.

Gossamer is the word that arose from all the seasonal airborne goose-fluff, and we use it now to describe tissue-thin fabrics and cobwebs and mists. But it doesn’t hurt to smile at the sense of goose the word contains.

Nowadays it may be that language is changing faster even than glaciers calve.