A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
ceja
A ceja is an eyebrow of land, the rim at the top of an escarpment where the mesa breaks and the country falls away. In New Mexico, it is a working place name for exactly that edge, as in the Ceja del Río Puerco west of Albuquerque, the long dark rim you watch for an hour before you reach it. In the Andes, the same word works at another scale entirely: the ceja de selva, the eyebrow of the jungle, is the belt of cloud forest along the eastern flank of the range where the Andes drop toward the Amazon.
Etymology
The word is Spanish for eyebrow, and it comes from the Latin word for eyelashes. That Latin word is still in English in two places most people never connect: the cilia of biology, meaning tiny hairlike projections, and supercilious, which is literally raised-eyebrow. Spanish maps the body onto country in several other places too, using garganta, throat, for a gorge and boca, mouth, for a river mouth.