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jornada (hawr-NAH-duh) - n., (southwestern U.S.) a day's journey, esp. an arduous trek that must be completed in a day because of a lack of water.
In Spanish this also means more generally a day's work or even a day's time, but the deserts of the southwestern United States have several stretches that have to be pushed through, including New Mexico's notorious Jornada del Muerto, "the dead man's day's journey," a valley to the east of the Rio Grande between Las Cruces and Socorro ("succor") that despite the name is actually a couple day's journey by horse (it's about 100 miles) and in good times had a couple watering places about a day apart:
Thanks, WikiMedia! Click to embiggen.
Why then run the Camino Real through it? Because the Rio Grande valley parallel to that stretch is much more rugged (they had to do major work to run I-25 along it). Anyway, we got the word from Spanish, which got it from Occitan aka Old Provençal, from from Medieval Latin diurnata, with all the Spanish meanings, from diurnus, daily -- which makes it an exact cognate of English journey (which we got from diurnata via Old French).
---L.
In Spanish this also means more generally a day's work or even a day's time, but the deserts of the southwestern United States have several stretches that have to be pushed through, including New Mexico's notorious Jornada del Muerto, "the dead man's day's journey," a valley to the east of the Rio Grande between Las Cruces and Socorro ("succor") that despite the name is actually a couple day's journey by horse (it's about 100 miles) and in good times had a couple watering places about a day apart:
Thanks, WikiMedia! Click to embiggen.
Why then run the Camino Real through it? Because the Rio Grande valley parallel to that stretch is much more rugged (they had to do major work to run I-25 along it). Anyway, we got the word from Spanish, which got it from Occitan aka Old Provençal, from from Medieval Latin diurnata, with all the Spanish meanings, from diurnus, daily -- which makes it an exact cognate of English journey (which we got from diurnata via Old French).
---L.
