knoll

Some things have clear definitions, or at least seem to. Linguists will point out that you can come up with a definition of chair that will match most but not all chairs and will exclude most but not all things that aren’t chairs, for instance, but you can’t come up with a definition that covers all chairs and no other things, partly because there will always be some edge cases that people will disagree about (you may find some such in art galleries), and partly because chairness is a matter of common functional knowledge rather than strict definition. And yet there is rarely any confusion about whether something is a chair. Most people would agree that chair is much less vague than, say, cup, let alone art. 

Contrast this with knoll.

Now, you know what a knoll is, right? You’ve heard the term. You likely have this general image in your mind: a kind of rounded little hill, or something of that order – more than a mound, but much less than a mountain. You might in particular know the phrase grassy knoll. You might (probably not, but you could) even know that knoll comes from an old Germanic root that also descended to words in other languages for ‘lump’, ‘ball’, or ‘turnip’. So, though a knoll can’t roll, it’s rounded. But how big is it? And how big isn’t it? I was driving with my dad recently in the Okanagan region and he pointed at a long, rounded, grassy, lightly treed prominence in the middle of the valley and said, “Would you call that a knoll?” And I wasn’t sure whether or not I would.

Now, if we had been oceanographers, the question could have been resolved by checking some measurements, because in oceanography knoll means ‘rounded fully underwater hill with a prominence of less than 1000 metres’. They’ve set an in-group definition, as one does in the sciences. It’s the same kind of taxonomic imposition as one encounters when someone tells you that a strawberry is not a berry but a banana is: that’s true when you’re speaking in botanical terms, but it’s different from the common-knowledge usages that communicate to ordinary people in ordinary contexts. So the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, does not at all meet the oceanographic definition of knoll, and yet.

And yet it also might not meet every ordinary speaker’s definition of a knoll either. It’s not pointy-topped, true, but it’s also barely prominent at all in its surroundings. It’s several times the height of a person, but less than the height of any of the trees on it. If you were to ask a person “Would you call that a knoll?” they wouldn’t necessarily say so. But it’s the term that Albert Merriman Smith used when describing the location in connection with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and so it stuck. So we have an established and accepted precedent for calling a low rounded earth form with a prominence of less than ten metres a knoll, for what that’s worth. (Most people who have heard of the grassy knoll probably don’t have a clear picture in their minds of what it looks like. It’s smaller than I expected, I’ll tell you that.)

OK, so what’s the upper size limit of a knoll? How are we even supposed to know? Some people do seem to use the term loosely. In a recent Robb Report article quoted by Merriam-Webster, we see “Built over 25 years ago, the 50,000-square-foot domed dwelling is perched atop a 2,400-foot-high knoll, offering up 60 miles of sprawling coastal vistas.” I think that’s rather high for a knoll, and I have to wonder whether the author is the same kind of thesaurus-scraper who would say “we munched oatmeal” or “Chumbawamba crooned ‘Tubthumping.’” But it does convey the idea that the hill in question is rounded (at least I hope it is).

To help establish an upper limit for knollness, I’ve looked up a few things that have Knoll in their names. As you might expect, they’re more prominent than many knolls you might think of (because why would we have articles about insignificant knolls?). There’s Long Knoll (not to be confused with the former prime minister of Cambodia, Lon Nol), which is in Wiltshire, England, and has a prominence – in the topographic sense – of 171 metres. There’s Brent Knoll (which is probably also the name of one or more persons), in Somerset, England, a significant local land feature near the Bristol Channel with a prominence of 137 metres. There is The Knoll, on Ross Island, Antarctica, which rises 370 metres above the sea. There’s Cave Knoll, in Utah, which is more hard and lumpy looking and with pointy bits on top but has a prominence of just 95 metres. There’s Grindslow Knoll, in Derbyshire, which actually stands (or sits) a few hundred metres above its surrounds but has a high col connection to a neighbouring peak that makes its topographic prominence a mere 15 metres. And then there’s Bluff Knoll, in Western Australia. 

I think Bluff Knoll tests the limits of common knoll-edge. Or perhaps it’s just bluffing. It’s the highest peak in its range, has a prominence of 650 metres, and has cliff edges on one side of its summit – a questionable kind of knoll-edge, to my mind. Granted, much of its overall form is rolling and even grassy, but come on. I’ve seen smaller things called “mountains.” I feel that Governor James Stirling, who named it Bluff Knoll (and after whom the range it’s in has been named), was rather pushing it. It might be better to call it what it has been called for much longer by the people who were there long before Sterling showed up: Pualaar Miial, which means ‘great many-faced hill’. Which, incidentally, seems inconsistent with what I would think of as a knoll.

But then what do I knoll? I wasn’t even sure about that long hill in the Okanagan. Knowing what I knoll now, I would call it one. Or I might just call it a hill, albeit a little one. Anyway, “mountain” would be right out.