Reconnoiter

Reconnoiter

Reconnoiter. 

The first time I read that word was in Brian Jacques’ Redwall. Two talking mice carrying steel swords, and wearing battle armor are going to reconnoiter the area ahead for any evil cats. I stopped immediately and read the sentence again. I read the paragraph again. I read the page again. I read it out loud. I sound it out.

Reh-kon-noy-tuhr

Well, it’s close to reconnoissance so it must mean the same thing. After semi-sucessfully divining the words meaning I moved on. Despite flipping through one hundred more pages that day the word stuck in my head. Nobody uses that word. Nobody says the word ‘reconnoiter.’

I kept my eyes open for months afterwards to hear those syllables in some cartoon show or another. In hindsight that was a bit foolish given that the vocabulary of saturday morning cartoons extended to ‘victory’, ‘defeat’, and exultant ‘yeah!’s. Not once did I hear it. The word continued to confound me.

It’s a verb. Does it have a noun form? Reconnoissance? Is that correct? In tv shows people just say ‘recon.’ Recon was the word used in all the video game titles I saw at Best Buy. How does one reconnoiter? I imagined stealthy G.I. Joes tip-toeing like the Scooby Doo gang outside some enemy base. Is it altogether different from surveillance? What makes the word so unique?. It’s french. Why use this word? Most importantly: Why does the word reconnoiter sound so weird to say outloud?

Reconnoiter.