About the weather...

[muckefuck]

Sometimes I wish the Eskimo really did have a hundred words for snow, since then we could borrow one to describe what I had to walk through this morning. It looked like snow as it fell but it felt like rain on my skin--not like it was melting on contact, like the first shy flurry of the year, but like it was already liquid inside before it touched me and only had the semblance of an ice crystal. If this were German, I would simply blend Schnee and Regen and call it "Schnegen". Oh, wait, it's English, which means that any German word is fair game.

I kept my eyes peeled for any sign of accumulation, but any flash of white I saw turned out to be nothing more than light reflecting off a slick tree branch or roof tile. When I left for St. "Brown Christmas" Louis two weeks ago, Chicago was still covered in a thick layer of snow, which I expected to come back to on the 27th. But several warm days had reduced it to a few icy piles in the corners of parking lots and it's been nothing but rain and drizzle (on an almost daily basis) ever since. Looking out my windows, the mood is late fall or earliest spring, not dead of winter--how very disorienting.

Comments

[febrile.livejournal.com]

I think the term "Wintery Mix" is appropriate for this morning. Which I always mentally translate as Shitty Piss Falling From the Sky in my non-Rockwellian manner.

I do wonder about these words, though, and don't think we ever came up with a term for that pseudo-snow that can survive in parking lots for weeks of above-freezing temperatures....

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

GOOD GODS CHECK YOUR MAIL

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I remember coming up with a name I liked, but it was rejected by the collective and I consequently forgot it.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I did! I check it every day and STILL NO FOPPERY! I really hope it arrives before my Twelth Night party this weekend!

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

Humpf! Stupid mail.

[foodpoisoningsf.livejournal.com]

I thought the Eskimo only had twenty-seven words for snow. At least that's my version of the urban legend. Whenever I hear all i can say is "that's nice. Italians have two-hundred-seveteen words for pasta/i>.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

That's the exact same point (though using the example of typesetters and fonts) that Geoffrey Pullum makes when he debunks this urban legend in "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary hoax". (Sadly, the fact that this essay has been around twenty years has done nothing to stem the incessant torrent of clichés.)