'Of or Pertaining to a Lake or Lakes'

I find that I first encountered the word lacustrine on Jan. 3, 1972, while reading Vladimir Nabokov’s fifth novel, Glory, as translated from Russian by the author and his son Dmitri. Our hero and a girl plan an outing to the countryside beyond the confines of Berlin: “[A]nd so, one marvelous, impeccably cloudless morning, Martin [Edelweiss] and Sonia were off for the lacustrine, reedy, piny outskirts of the city . . .”

The context was no help and it’s obvious my Latin was already threadbare. In the marginalia I left on Page 146, my nineteen-year-old self informs my sixty-six-year-old self that I consulted the OED and found this: “of or pertaining to a lake or lakes.” And I added, “like riparian.” For once, I’m not embarrassed by an annotation my younger self left in a book. More often it is something English major-fatuous like “foreshadowing” or “symbolism.”

One of the unanticipated pleasures of reading the same copy of a book read long ago is the occasional glimpse I get of that alien but familiar me. Lacustrine is precisely the word that would stop me again today. Now I think, what is the word’s Russian original? Or is it Nabokov showing off his scientific nomenclature? According to the OED, the word had a fifty-year vogue among scientists in the nineteenth century. The Dictionary cites the great Scottish geologist Charles Lyell (“I collected six species of lacustrine shells”) and the English biologist Thomas Huxley (“Lacustrine Delta: The alluvial tract formed by a river at its embouchure into a lake”). Both were champions of Darwin and embouchure reminds me of Louis Armstrong and his famous callous. The rest of the OED entry reads:

“Said esp. of plants and animals inhabiting lakes, and Geology of strata, etc., which originated by deposition at the bottom of lakes; also with reference to ‘lake-dwellings’ such as those of prehistoric Europe. lacustrine age, lacustrine period: the period when lake-dwellings were common.”

I remain convinced that a path beginning with one word, if followed, can circle the world.