gorge

The Old French word gorge comes from Latin gurges, which meant 'whirlpool' or 'abyss.' But somewhere in the shift from Latin to Old French, the meaning shifted. Gorge came to mean specifically the throat—the narrow passage in the body where all things that enter or leave must pass. It is a closing-down word. A compression. The pharynx. Everything funnels through.

By the 1400s, English speakers borrowed gorge. At first it meant exactly what it did in French: the throat, the passage in the body. But by the 1500s, a curious transfer had happened. Travelers looking at deep valleys carved by rivers saw the same shape—a narrow passage with high walls on either side, a channel that compressed and funneled. They named it for the anatomy: a gorge. The earth had a throat. Things flowed through it as they flowed through ours.

The metaphorical application stuck. A mountain gorge. A river gorge. The Grand Canyon would eventually be called a gorge, though it is far too grand to swallow the comparison. The word that meant the narrow passage in your body became the word for any narrow passage the earth offered. The landscape had body parts. The body had landscapes. They could wear the same names.

In modern usage, 'gorge' is almost always the landscape now. Few people say 'gorge' to mean throat anymore—we say 'throat' or 'pharynx.' The word has emigrated from anatomy to geology. But the root memory is there: to gorge oneself is still to stuff the throat, to fill the passage. The action remembers what the noun forgot.