Katherine Wikoff

Our dog is never happier than when she’s outside on a sunny day, soaking up the rays in her backyard.

On the other hand, she is terrified of thunderstorms, to the point where she needs medication (trazodone) to get through the thunder and lightning. Even a light drizzle is traumatic. She’ll freeze at the sound of raindrops splashing against the windows, and on overcast days, she glances nervously up at the sky as if anticipating a cloudburst at any moment.

I maintain near-constant monitoring of the weather forecast, as a result. Multiple weather forecasts, in fact:

• Apple’s weather app
• Google’s featured 10-day forecast for Milwaukee
• Every Milwaukee television station’s website weather page

One local station includes continually-updating weather radar, so this website has become my “go to.” To be fair, Apple’s weather app also has updating radar. But the map itself on Apple’s app is completely white except for place names in black text and gray lines showing state borders, etc. Channel 6, on the other hand, uses satellite images showing actual physical features of the landscape.

Plus, although the weather system colors on Apple are aesthetically pleasing, in a range of pinks and purples, they are quite bland and limited compared with the sweeping palette offered on Channel 6: green for ordinary rain; yellow and red for heavier rain with thunder and lightning; and magenta/purple for a storm’s really scary, intense areas (like heavy rain, hail, and tornados).

VERY dramatic. Like: Uh oh, time for the trazodone.

But wait. What was the title of this blog post again?

Yes, I’m coming around to that 🙂

The best time to give our dog her trazodone is about 45 minutes ahead of a storm. That way she has a chance to get stupefied relaxed before the first thunder rolls and raindrops hit.

Timing her meds is kind of an art.

We hate giving her the drug for no reason, like if a storm fizzles out before reaching us, which sometimes happens. Or if, as happens other times, I kid you not, a giant storm splits as it approaches our section of Milwaukee, sending its two halves eastward around us like the Red Sea parting for Moses. You know how they talk about urban areas having microclimates? Sometimes I wonder if there’s some unseen temperature or air pressure phenomenon popping up that intercepts approaching storms and diverts them around the metro area.

But anyway, recently I was looking at the radar, checking out the progression of a storm system across the state of Wisconsin in an attempt to decide the odds of the red/yellow storms hitting Milwaukee. To get a feel for the overall rotation range of the entire system’s “low,” I zoomed out, away from Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin, to take in the entire state, including Michigan’s upper peninsula and the area surrounding Lake Superior.

Which is when I happened to notice that there are two cities of Sault St. Marie up there on the far eastern end of Michigan’s UP. One on the USA  side of the border and one on the Canada side. The Soo Locks are right there on the St. Mary River between Lake Superior and Lake Huron, so of course, it makes sense that the city would grow outward in a circle from that spot instead of being concentrated entirely on the U.S. side, with nothing across the border.

Then I thought about how Kansas City similarly straddles a border (between Kansas and Missouri), and I wondered if there was a special term for a city like that. The answer is yes, of course. Multiple terms, in fact, depending on whether the boundary/border lies between states or countries:

• Divided cities – one city divided by a border
• Transborder Agglomeration / Conurbation – large urban region or metro area spanning two or more states or countries
• Twin cities – two separate cities sitting right across the border from each other

Some well-known examples across state boundaries in the U.S., (taken straight from Google’s AI overview) include the following:

• Texarkana (Texas and Arkansas) – Famous for State Line Avenue, which splits the community, and a federal courthouse that physically straddles both states.
• Bristol (Virginia and Tennessee) – Shares a main street (State Street) dividing the two distinct municipal governments.
• Kansas City (Missouri and Kansas) – Often confused as a single entity, these are two completely separate neighboring cities divided by State Line Road within a shared metropolitan area.
• Union City (Indiana and Ohio) – adjoined municipalities split down the state boundary.

So that was interesting to learn!

And ChatGPT informs me that the term “twin cities” (or “sister” cities in some contexts) refers to two adjacent cities on opposite sides of a border that function closely together but remain separate municipalities. Examples include:

• El Paso and Ciudad Juárez
• Sault Ste. Marie and Sault Ste. Marie

Well, I got the answer to my question, and that would have been the end of that little trip down the rabbit hole—except then I thought about the name of Sault Ste. Marie and wondered why it is pronounced the way it is. It looks (and is) French, thanks to the original French explorers and fur traders, but the spelling of the “Soo Locks” reinforces the “Soo” sound instead of a more French-sounding “Sohl” (long “o” with just a barest hint of that “l” at the end) pronunciation.

I didn’t find the answer to that pronunciation question, but in looking up the word “sault” in French, I discovered that (again thanks to Google’s AI-enhanced summary), ”In older and colonial French, sault (modern spelling: saut) means a leap, jump, or waterfall/rapids (from the idea of water “leaping” over rocks).

I loved that image of water leaping and tumbling over the rapids that pre-existed the Soo Locks.

Which—finally!—brings me to the point of today’s post, as hinted at by its title. That image of “tumbling” made me wonder about the origin of “somersault.”

The word “somersault” (again courtesy of Google’s AI summary, relying on Reddit and a Saturday Evening Post article) comes from “the Old Provençal word sobresaut and Middle French sombresault, meaning ‘to jump over.’ The ‘somer’ part traces back to the Latin supra or super (meaning ‘over’ or ‘above’), which shifted phonetically through Old French into sobre– and was later corrupted or folk-etymologized into ‘somer.’”

I always thought of somersaults as adorable little floor rolls performed by children, but the Wikipedia article I checked out had several photos of gymnasts performing various forward and backward aerial “somersaults.” As I stared at the photos, trying to wrap my head around the connection between toddlers’ clumsy tumbles and gymnasts whirling through the air, it suddenly occurred to me that somewhere along the way I had apparently stopped monitoring thunderstorms and begun conducting an etymological investigation into gymnastics instead.

Which is exactly, my friends, how one goes from “Will the storm hit Milwaukee?” to “Why are there two Sault Ste. Maries?” to “What does sault mean anyway?” to “Wait—somersault?”

The weather forecast may have been predicting a storm, but I was the one who got swept away.