If the Inuit apocryphally
have 50 words for snow, why don't British people have 50 words for
rain... or at least more words than the few they normally employ, asks
Kevin Connolly.
| Your words for rain
|
|
|---|
1. Not Raining
|
Outdoor furniture is erected cautiously in gardens and on
balconies. Light to moderate rummaging takes places in rucksacks for
cagoules and pac-a-macs.
|
2. Mizzling
|
Women on way to hairdressing appointments proceed apprehensively without umbrellas.
|
3. Grizzerable
|
Overseas players on county cricket teams are surprised to discover that they're required to continue playing.
|
4. Woodfiddly Rain
|
Outdoor furniture is brought back indoors. Lips are pursed.
|
5. Mawky
|
Aggressive hawkers selling fold-up umbrellas appear outside
railway stations and shopping centres. Women on way back from
hairdressers form impatient queue.
|
6. Tippling Down
|
Garden furniture is returned to garden centres in hope of getting money back.
|
7. Luttering Down
|
Fingers drummed on indoor furniture. Eyes rolled. Tuts tutted
|
8. Plothering Down
|
Irritating displays of supposedly barbecue-friendly foods are removed from the entrance areas of supermarkets.
|
9. Pishpotikle Weather
|
Rain intensifies.Women with newly done hair find aggressive
hawkers have disappeared when they take defective umbrellas back in
search of a refund.
|
10. Raining Like a Cow Relieving Itself
|
Cows relieve themselves.
|
11. Raining Stair-rods
|
Any garden furniture not taken indoors floats away.
Reporters on 24-hour news channels began using words torrential and
holding their hands out with their palms upturned.
|
12. Siling Down
|
Hardy British holidaymakers are finally driven from beach at
Herne Bay. Garden furniture begins appearing on eBay. Water companies
introduce hosepipe bans, pointing to dry spell five years ago.
|
As the UK splashes and squelches its way through what's
turning into the wettest June on record, the most surprising news of the
summer is the inclusion of fake clouds in the elaborate plans for the
Olympic opening ceremony.
The bucolic idyll just wouldn't be complete without Maypole
dancers and sturdy ploughmen of course; perhaps we will even hear the
fractious shouts of angry travellers and bailiffs as a mock-eviction is
conducted, or the nagging whine of an uninsured moped.
And somewhere above it will hover imagineered clouds - the
message to the world, presumably, is that we can take a joke about our
weather. And if providence chooses not to rain on our parade, then we'll
rain on our own for the hell of it.
Will fake clouds really be needed at the opening ceremony?
It just goes to show you how deeply the very thought of rain is woven into the experience of being British.
And yet our official lexicon of rainfall is woefully buttoned-up and limited.
The Met Office talks simply of light, moderate and severe
downfalls. That's rather disappointing when you consider the poetry of
the Beaufort Scale for measuring wind, with its evocative talk of smoke rising vertically on a calm day,
and then goes on to describe singing sounds from telegraph wires and
the difficulty of walking upright as breezes intensify into gales.
After all, if it's really true that the Inuit have 50 words
for snow on the basis that they see enough of the stuff to chart its
infinite variety, then surely in the UK we ought to have 50 words for
rain.
There's drizzle of course - although I'm not sure that's an
officially recognised term - but not much beyond that until you get to
deluge (which is French) and downpour (which is dull).
I turn to the linguist Geoff Pullum from Edinburgh University
for an explanation as to why the English language appears to lag behind
Inuit in the richness and sophistication with which it describes the
weather.
Even over the phone, I can almost hear his eyes rolling with despair.
No, he says patiently, Inuit languages do NOT
have 50 words for snow. They don't have them because they don't need
them. So it follows that we don't need 50 words for rain from a
linguistic perspective.
Yes, he agrees, he has been asked this question many times before.
"I have long experience in this depressing sub-area," Pullum
tells me. "The idea is neither empirically true nor practically
necessary.
"There's a screwiness to the logic here [of having 50 words
for snow]. As humans we experience lots of variety in everyday life but
we don't try to bring it under linguistic observation. It's just
observably not what we do."
To re-enforce his point, Pullum offers the examples of
surfers who spend their lives thinking about surf. It looms large in
their imaginations, they think about it and talk about it all the time
and its capacity for infinite subtleties. And yet they're quite content
to have a single word for it. Surf.
Still when we posed the question to the Broadcasting House
audience on Radio 4 we were deluged, inundated and flooded with
suggestions for words for rain.
One heartening conclusion is that colloquial English is a lot
more vibrant, colourful and expressive than its slightly grander cousin
deployed in the Met Office.
Many colloquial words for rain are regional or have their roots in the Celtic nations, such as
dreich in Scots English and
soft weather in the euphemism-laden Hiberno-English spoken in Ireland.
There are plenty I'd like to hear weather forecasters using on the air:
- tippling down
- pelting down
- raining cats and dogs
And there are more with the sturdy feel of regional English.
Luttering down,
siling down and
plothering down
are among my favourites. You can't honestly put them in order of
severity, of course, but all conjure that sense of looking out of the
window on a rainy day somewhere in provincial Britain and seeing rain
hammering relentlessly from a sky the colour of cigarette ash.
One of the commonest and most vividly descriptive phrases is
raining stair-rods.
I like it because I shouldn't think many people in the UK have seen a
stair-rod for 50 years or more so it has the comfortable feeling of a
phrase your mother or father might have used to describe the rain.
The analogy, of course, is the rain falling in long, straight
streaks - both German and French have words using the imagery of ropes
or cords to do the same thing.
It also strikes me as being a slightly more useful point of comparison than another phrase we were offered -
raining chair-legs.
Perhaps surprisingly, the most graphic of the terms comes from French - a phrase which says simply it's
raining like a cow relieving itself, which conjures an unpalatable but graphic image of force and abundance.
Parts of the UK have had a very wet hosepipe ban
And why don't these phrases find their way into the lexicon of
TV weather forecasting? Perhaps it's because we're rather a buttoned-up
audience and we still crave a little formality on TV and radio.
BBC weather forecaster Matt Taylor says there is no style guide for talking about the weather.
"There's no big book of words you shouldn't use, so I think
there's a bit of self-censorship there - sometimes you do want to say
that it's going to be
chucking it down out there. But
of course there are a lot of colloquialisms here so there's also the
point of whether people will really know exactly what you mean."
None of us - with the possible exception of Taylor and his
fellow meteorologists - knows exactly what the weather will be doing
when the Olympics opening ceremony finally gets under way next month.
But when that fake cloud splutters into life and rain begins
to fall on the green and pleasant land below, it's a pleasure to think
that all over the UK, families will have a rich and varied vocabulary to
call on when it comes to describing it.
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