Bucolic

I recall when teaching for the British Council, Warsaw, in one of my advanced English classes, a girl who thanked me because she had learned a new word that day, which I had spoken earlier in the class, that of 'bucolic'. It was the way she said it, as if that had been the only thing she had learned, and yet she was beaming as if she had just found an uncut diamond lying on the classroom floor. 

She repeated the word to me - bucolic, and I smiled, as I had not long learned it myself. It is a marvellous word, is it not? And yet, I never really knew what it meant until I looked it up today and saw that it meant 'shepherd' or 'herdsman'. It derives from Greek boukolikos "pastoral, rustic," from boukolos "cowherd, herdsman," from bous "cow" + -kolos "tending," related to Latin colere "to till (the ground), cultivate, dwell, inhabit". The bucolic then becomes a form of culture and cultivation, where the shepherd leads his self (out of its cocoon).

Indeed, the Scots Gaelic, buchaille, is a mountain in Glencoe that I ascended with my brother Patrick years ago. The buchaille is the herdsman for it leads all others not as wise, not as wily, not as wild. It seems fitting then that as a teacher I should use the word.