Holiday reading is a great source of interesting vocabulary. This turned up in S M Stirling’s time-travel story, Island in the Sea of Time, in which Nantucket Island is thrown back 3000 years through an unspecified event:
Holiday reading is a great source of interesting vocabulary. This turned up in S M Stirling’s time-travel story, Island in the Sea of Time, in which Nantucket Island is thrown back 3000 years through an unspecified event: “You could see smudges of black woodsmoke drifting out over the smaragdine brightness of the harbor.” Poul Anderson’s There Will be Time, another time-travel story, also includes it: “On a transverse axis, vision reached from glittering blue across the Sea of Marmora to a mast-crowded Golden Horn and the rich suburbs and smaragdine heights beyond.”
Fittingly, the term is ancient. It means an emerald-green colour. It probably derives from Sanskrit marataka for an emerald (though a Semitic source has also been suggested). This was taken into Gre