Scenary (for Scenery)

The other day I heard a local newscaster remark, "Scenery is one of the things that make this state unique." Really? I thought scenery was one of those things that all places had, pretty much by definition. Of course, he meant the specific scenery found in New York State, not scenery in general, but as my 91-year-old Lebanese neighbor says (she learned this from her mother): "Everywhere you go, the earth is brown and the trees are green." During car rides as a child, my grandfather (an amateur painter and nature lover) would constantly adjure us kids to "watch the scenery." This was probably in part to make us stop squabbling and direct our attention outside the vehicle, but it also gave the word scenery a rather special import. I selected this picture because it depicts a gorgeous scene, although the author doesn't identify its actual location. Everywhere you go there's scenery and today's typo for this word appears nine times in OhioLINK, and 296 times in WorldCat.

(A beautiful photo of a bird flying high in the sky during sunset, 24 November 2011, from Wikmedia Commons.)

Carol Reid