Saturday, June 12, 2010

Here You Are...And Everything Is So Great, And So Beautiful...IO

This line of Here You Are took me to an Iroquois word definition. It is interesting to me because in the original text of Here You Are it only said "beautiful", to which my then five year old son objected, saying that girls are beautiful, but boys are great. So I added "great" after a failed attempt to find a word that meant both "great" and "beautiful". Seems like I am not the only one who has tried to figure this out. Turns out... everything is so io!

"Io", derived from the word wiyo, means good to the Seneca and great to the Tuscarora. Now, the word tends to be translated as beautiful (as in Ohio - beautiful river) but originally it meant great. There are various spellings of the word such as wiio and yiio. 

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