quagmire

For peat’s sake, give us a fair shake. We know the topic is mired in uncertainty; we know there’s question of how it can hold water; but this is a matter of centuries of accumulated understanding. Let’s not get bogged up.

“Bogged down”? Well, yes, I can see why you’d say that, but let me give you a fresh perspective: a bog is up.

Perhaps I am swamping you here; let’s back out and dry off, and I’ll be back to bogs in a moment. Today’s word is quagmire, but I don’t mean to emulate one (not this time). 

You probably know quagmire more in a figurative sense (unless you’re a huge fan of Family Guy, in which case you know it first as the name of a character on that show, but since that particular character is creepier and slimier than a dank fen at midnight, I’ll leave him behind). If you read the news, you are likely to know it for its application to intractable military excursions, notably in Vietnam and Afghanistan – two countries in which (ironically) there are few literal quagmires (in Afghanistan, there appear to be none at all). You will also see quagmire with words such as bureaucratic, legal, and political. It can also be used for matters more personal, as in Robert Creeley’s poem “The Door”:

Lady, do not banish me
for digressions. My nature
is a quagmire of unresolved
confessions. Lady, I follow.

What, precisely, is a quagmire? A sticky muck? Is the “qu” the sound of a foot losing its boot? When you know the true answer, the ground will tremble.

Probably. Well, we’re not sure entirely, but quag (a word beloved of many Scrabble players) may be related to quake. And in any event, what distinguishes a quagmire from any other mire (about which mire, I mean more, to come below) is that below the plant-matter surface is liquid (water and other things), below which lies even more muck. If you step a foot on a quagmire, it will shake and quake; if you put your weight then on that foot, you may well sink into it, and then you will get bogged down indeed.

Oh, yes. Let’s get back to the downness and upness of bogs. You see, while we use words such as bog and fen and swamp and marsh and (for the Brontë sort) moor in a general and rather soft and squishy and shaky way, knowing generally what we have in mind but not willing to put any weight on the understanding, biologists have (as they sometimes do) given the terms more precise definitions. And the first thing to know is: a fen is down, a bog is up.

OK, that’s a bit simplistic, but only barely. Both fen and bog are kinds of mire; a mire is a wet peatland, and peat, as you may know, is partially decomposed plant matter, accumulated over centuries (growing at an average rate of a millimetre a year), typically largely composed of moss, with an assortment of biochemical characteristics, such as an ability to preserve corpses for millennia (bones not included). But whereas a fen is situated in a place such that its wetness can be fed and sustained by groundwater, a bog has accumulated so much peat that it has risen above its surrounds, and its wetness is fed and sustained entirely by rain (and, in places such as Sweden, which is approximately 14% peatland, sometimes snow).

Another distinction that you may enjoy bringing forth at parties is: a swamp has its branches, a marsh has its roots. This, too, is simplistic, but the point is that a swamp is characterized by tall vegetation such as trees and papyrus, and may or may not have peat, whereas a marsh is a kind of wetland that has plants rooted in mineral soil, and so is not a peatland.

And where in all this is the quagmire? A quagmire is, as said, a floating mire, one that makes waves like a waterbed (speaking of unresolved confessions). If it is a bog, it is called a quaking bog; if it is a fen, it is a quagfen.

But why stop there? Never mind the unresolved confessions (yes, never mind them, I say; they will only suck you in); let us look at the unresolved etymologies, the endless accumulation of lexical sphagnum, the words that came from somewhere organically and now decay on the sacred papyrus of the dictionary. There are, once you test the surface, some other synonyms for the bog-standard quagmire. There is – I owe this to Oxford – quallmire, and quamire, and quavemire, and quawmire; in later levels, there is quabmire, and quadmire, and quakemire; there is even bog-mire and gog-mire. Mires they are one and all, but as to what kind of quagulation, or quallity, or quaveform, well, it boots little to attempt to discover. If you try to put any weight on your under-standing, in fact, your boot will be gone for good. Don’t try to rescue it, unless you want to be a museum piece circa AD 4024.

So. Does all of that clear up questions? Do you feel more rooted, or are you swamped and unmoored? Some of it is new, yes, but, like all lexis, it joins the sodden mass of language floating on the water of culture. So you can let it sink in. Or vice versa.