Pigeonries
PIGEONHOLE, n., v. Pigeons have come up a lot lately in my life, so I’ve been thinking about related words. Here is a thing I just learned from my friend, Elia Winters, who is writing a historical romance about the US Army Pigeon Service in World War II: pigeons can fly distances of six hundred miles (!) or sixty miles per hour (!!). And yes, they were still being used to send messages in World War II.
Anyway, people who raise pigeons or doves often keep them in structures with lots of little alcoves for the birds. Here is an amazing ancient stone one that I think is located in Iran (I licensed it from DepositPhotos and they don’t offer any information about their images, which kills me):
*slaps the roof of my ancient carved stone dovecote* this bad boy can fit so many pigeons
These structures are sometimes called “dovecotes” or “pigeonries,” and it’s easy to see how the individual alcoves could be called “pigeonholes.” It’s not too much of a semantic leap from these little recesses to other small compartments, or from literal pigeons going into their pigeonholes to things-that-are-not-pigeons getting sorted into their places. By 1870, people are using the verb “pigeonhole” to mean “label mentally,” which is how I mainly hear it today, not knowing too many people with dovecotes.
A more modern, wooden dovecote.
A funny thing about using “pigeonhole” to mean “categorize” or “label mentally” is that I realized while writing this that I don’t actually know the difference between pigeons and doves. But don’t worry, it turns out that the distinction isn’t technical; basically English speakers call big ones pigeons and small ones doves, but they’re all part of the family Columbidae. Columba, by the way, is Latin for “dove.” “Dove” itself has roots all the way back in Proto-Germanic. “Pigeon” comes to English through French, hence its spelling, and can be traced back to the Latin verb “pipire,” meaning “to peep.” Originally it was used to refer only to young birds.
“Columba” is where we get the word “columbarium,” which my father recently pointed out to me used to be Latin for “dovecote,” but now means a wall in a cemetery where urns or ashes are stored. Our final pigeonholes.
This is a columbarium in a cemetery in Moscow.
Let’s sort some books and label them mentally! This week in small-r romance, I read:
Back in the Day (m/f, both cis and het, historical, contemporary) by Katrina Jackson. This book intertwines two stories, one set in 2010 where Amir is helping his widowed father Alonzo move out of the family home, and one set in 1967 where music writer Alonzo covers the Monterey Pop Festival and meets his future wife, photographer Ada. A lot of romance novels have protagonists who have lost a parent, but this exploration of grief is unusual—it’s after the Happily Ever After. It’s a celebration of the beginning, but also the end of a romance, and what comes after that: memory, family, community. The 2010-set storyline has some scenes set in the Black community in Oakland that are really beautiful. Content warnings: death, grief, sex.
Half a Soul (m/f, both cis and het, historical, fantasy) by Olivia Atwater. I saw several people tweet about how much they loved this book, which is set in a magical version of Regency England, and had to get it because everyone who’d read it was talking about how great the banter is. They were all correct! One of the protagonists in this book, Dora, was sold to a faerie by her mother, but when that faerie came to collect, he was only able to get half her soul. As a consequence, Dora doesn’t react to social cues the way other people expect her to—she’s neurodivergent!—but what other characters view as her weakness turns out to be a strength. This was delightful. Content warnings: ableism (treated as such in the book), minor violence/blood.
And in things that are romance-adjacent, I read Alix E. Harrow’s charming fantasy novel The Ten Thousand Doors of January, which has astonishingly crafted sentences and many layers of stories, both things that I love. I also read Noelle Stevenson’s graphic novel memoir The Fire Never Goes Out, which is mostly about being a queer artist and living with mental illness, but is also a little bit about falling in love with her wife, and was powerful but also sweet and funny.
See you next week!
