Sharawadgi - how author learned new term, meaning deliberate asymmetry

National Review, Oct 27, 1989 by Peter Lubin

THE CONNOISSEUR of words (le con- noisseur des mots, if you will, il gran conoscitore di parole) never knows when he will find a new specimen, and he herein offers an example. The connoisseur (also known as "I") was recently minding his business while doing some grocery shopping on Martha's Vineyard. I was up-island at a supermarket, newly sprung up where once had stood a farmers' market. I waited patiently to pay for a six-pack of yoghurt, only to discover 1 would have to obtain summer check-cashing privileges." So I stood in another line, filled out a form, and waited at the Courtesy Booth to pose for the proleptic mug shot. While I stood there, I began talking to a seven-year-old boy and his younger sister. The boy told me some of the big words he knows, and I told him some of the ones I know. He gave as good as he got, but after a few minutes, as the line shortened, and knowing it would soon be my turn, and we would have to part, I presented him with a word I was sure he wouldn't know: sharawadgi.

He was delighted when I told him, in terms suitable for a seven-year-old, what the word meant, and I was glad to pass it along, having learned it

myself only the morning before, on a beach in Chilmark from a local landscape architect. It is, I suspect, a word many people would enjoy knowing. I have no doubt there are more connoisseurs of such a word than the world is ready to admit.

There is the sound of it: sha-ra-wadgi. It is invitingly fluffy and plump, like a Persian pillow, and expresses in a single word an idea both useful and enchanting.

When my beach acquaintance first gave me the word, I knew it was promising-a probable specimen for the collection, although I would have to investigate further. I went to the local library that very afternoon, and

I was lucky. The Chilmark library may not have many books, but what it has is choice, and it is big on gardens. Here's what your gran conoscitore and humble servant discovered: The word was introduced into English by the formidable Sir William Temple floruit 1690), who possessed the vast estate of Moor Park and was a lover of gardens. Having nothing better to do in those pre-Nintendo days, Temple would sometimes put pen to paper, and, in an essay on gardens, he tried to distinguish the kind of garden then being created in England from the formal gardens popular on the Continent. He suggested that the guiding principle of the English garden was what the Chinese called sharawadgi. So wrote Sir William, although Chinese scholars have doubted his etymology. Nonetheless, the word entered our language, sank beneath its surface for several centuries, and has recently been rediscovered by landscape architects; which is how it came to me, as I lay, a sunburnt offering, beneath the lazy Squibnocket sky.

What is sharawadgi"? It is the beauty that comes from deliberate asymmetry. Think of the English garden or landscape. There's a single gnarled oak over there, some bushes over here, a group of three elms beyond, and a winding stream. This, wrote Temple, contrasts with, say, the studied regularity of the French garden, where lindens or poplars stand like palace guards, or the Italian garden with its rows of sad cypresses and elaborate topiary art. He argued that the garden based on the principle of sharawadgi-which implied a design dictated by Nature, not Art was superior.

Perhaps. But most of us, chained to the wheel of work and in city pent, are grateful for any green thought, the smallest bit of cool shade, any half-acre of Aready, or one lamb-bleat of bucolic. What the connoisseur of words wishes to stress is the pleasure of "sharawadgi." Once you know the word, the world is never the same. Once I had learned it, I went traipsing about the Vineyard, looking for sharawadgi in the landscapes of God and man, and I found it. There was sharawadgi at Beetlebung Corner, and amid the wildflowers on the dunes at Gay Head. There was little

sharawadgi in the vineyards of West Tinsbury, or in the elaborate rose gardens of Edgartown, but the beauty (and there was plenty of it), regular

and irregular, was made more beautiful by the vivid word I now carried with me; vade-mecum, talisman, boon companion. Sha-ra-wad-gi.