Sunday, January 15, 2006
The Name of the Snows
Some of you might remember my Great Canadian Insult contest. With your indulgence, we're going to do another naming contest.
Esmikos, as linguists like to tell us, have over 100 words for snow. The point of this sophomoric piece of wisdom is that languages evolve to describe the environments in which people find themselves.
Unfortunately, modern TV/internet society seems to find little reason to find new names for anything except different types of websites. This is a shame, because English is poor in words to describe the life experiences of northerners (not just Canucks, but also northern Americans - hi Yak, hi sabatkes).
Take today in my town, for example. It's been unseasonably warm the last few days, so the snow on the ground had that crunchy texture when it's been thawing and freezing repeatedly. Then we got (shudder) freezing rain, so the snow got that hazardous shiny candy-glaze quality. Then, at night fall, the temperature plummetted to minus 10 celcius, so the rain turned into those really sharp-edged, crystalline snow-flakes.
Whaddaya call all those things? OK, 100 words is probably way too many, but there have to be at least a couple dozen environmental experiences of northerners that we can't adequately describe.
In my life, I've heard exactly three alternate words for snow:
- Powder - the skiing term for the light, moist type of snow that typically occurs around -5 degrees celcius.
- Slush - mixture of semi-melted snow and ice mixed with dirt on heavily travelled roads.
- Snard - little-used term to describe the lumps of snow, dirt and ice that accumulate under tire wells on cars.
So my challenge to you readers is to identify a category of snow or snow-ice and then come up with your own colourful term. Let me start you off:
- Crunch- the above-described long-standing ground snow that has melted and frozen repeatedly
- KnifeIce - sharp, crystalline minus-10-celcius-type falling snow
I look forward to your creative responses.
posted by Mentok @ 10:13 p.m.,
3 Comments:
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At 11:25 p.m.,
mkecurler said...
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does "dandruff from above" count?
we also call it "poopwrap". When walking the dog, and she does her thing, the snow makes for a better grip into the baggie! -
At 1:29 p.m.,
Bathroom Hippo said...
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Heavenly Urination -
At 7:38 a.m.,
A. B. Chairiet said...
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bastardized rain
