With the last few months reported to have been the wettest for 150 years, this is a great time to brush up on your rain-related word repertoire – and new book 100 Words for Rain does just that.
Weather: from climate crisis to politicians
Have you ever saved up for a rainy day, had your head in the clouds or generally felt under the weather? The British obsession with weather and the words we use to describe it have come to define us.
We talk about it endlessly – five whole months of our lives to be precise. It affects our moods, shopping habits and even how we vote.
Talking about weather is, proverbially, how Brits break the ice with strangers, what we obsess about as farmers, gardeners, builders, sailors, birders or hikers, and what we try our best as parents to predict – especially before or during school holidays.
With such a potentially infinite subject, where should one begin?
The Collins Dictionary valiantly tries to straitjacket this vast, amorphous topic of weather as ‘the day-to-day meteorological conditions, esp. temperature, cloudiness, and rainfall, affecting a specific place.’ Erm. Well, yes and no.
100 Words for Rain
As Alex Johnson makes beautifully clear in 100 Words for Rain, ‘weather’ is an infinite seam of personal and social meaning to be mined by poets, philosophers, politicians. He has deftly organised the material into chapters that alternate invitingly between specific ‘meteorological phenomena’ such as ‘fog’, ‘rain’ and ‘snow and ice’, and other weather-related facts and fancies.
Maybe you’re a pluviophile, a lover of rain and someone who finds joy and peace of mind during rainy days, or wetchered, which is what you are after being soaked in a downpour.
Perhaps you’ve wondered what a cow-quaker is – ‘a storm in May after the cows have gone back into the fields (so heavy it makes them “quake”)’.
Did you know that petrichor is a sweet smell that is produced when rain falls on parched earth, or that thundersnow means snowfall occurring with thunder and lightning.
And no listing of rain expressions would be complete without the Welsh equivalent of raining cats and dogs: Mae hi’n brwr hen wragedda ffyn – It’s raining old women and sticks.
Did you know that National Trust attendance tends to peak when the thermometer hits 240C or that when the temperature rises by 100C, demand for burgers rockets by 300%?
Inside 100 Words for Rain, you’ll find the answers to many other weather-related quandaries including how the weather affects our mood; literary facts; regional weather terms; and fascinating insights into aspects of the weather that haven’t occurred to you.
Alex Johnson is a journalist and author. His books include ‘Shedworking’, ‘Menus that Made History’ and ‘The Book Lover’s Joke Book’.
100 Words for Rain is out now. You can purchase a copy here.
Featured image via Collins
