[#語言與文化] //All of this talk about weather has led to a number of words that enliven British English. Take ‘Northern nanny’, which describes cold hail and windstorm coming from the north, or ‘moor-gallop’, a sudden squall on a moor. Lexicographer Susan Rennie says that English dialects are “rich in weather words and I love ‘dinderex’, a Devon term for a bolt of lightning which literally means ‘thunder-axe’.”
Similarly, Japan – another island nation with unpredictable weather – has a wealth of vivid words to describe specific weather events. 'Otoko-zuyu', or ‘man rain’, denotes a heavy rain; 'onna-zuyu', or ‘woman rain’, is lighter. Japan’s rainy season, the 'tsuyu', translates to ‘plum rain’.
Back in Britain, weather words aren’t just many and diverse – they also show a whimsical attitude towards language. After all, Brits love wordplay. How many other nations have a game show with a resident lexicographer, like Countdown’s Susie Dent? This fascination with language games extends to the way Brits talk about the weather. Describing a storm as a ‘hurly-burly’ is one example. The onomatopoeia of ‘feefle’, a Scots word for snow swirling around a corner, is another.
Weather is compared to food, as with ‘custard wind’ (cold, easterly winds on England’s northeast coast). It’s likened to animals, for instance a ‘cat’s nose’ (cool north-westerly wind), or ‘raining cats and dogs’ (the exact etymology is contested, but the phrase has English origins). ‘Cow-quaker’ refers to May storms after cows were let into the fields, while a ‘lambing storm’ is a light spring snowfall. In Scots, small broken clouds can be described as ‘horse-guts’. But, Rennie points out, “there are human metaphors too, such as ‘pouthered lawyer’, a term from the 19th Century that describes a fluffy cloud that resembles a powdered lawyer’s wig.”
A light spring snowfall is known as a ‘lambing storm’
Whimsical weather words aren’t the sole purview of the British. Other variants of English also have plenty. There’s ‘sugar weather’ in Canada, to describe the cold weather that gets maple syrup running, and ‘toad-strangler’ (very heavy rain) along the Gulf Coast of the US.//
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