Precipitation

There is an old joke that goes…

Question: Why do Eskimos have ninety words for “snow” in their language?
Answer: Because they need them.

(I said the joke was old. I never said it was a particularly good joke!)

If Douglas Adam’s observation was correct in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul then humor can go a long way to revealing dark and hidden truths which underlie the collective psyche of the society that they develop in. This observation is actually made by a psychologist who is completely out of touch with his human side in the book and who, incidentally, doesn’t get the joke anyway. But it raises the question… what other languages should be padded a bit with words that mean different types of the same class of thing? The question is would the joke be as humorous as it presumably is if we made a couple substitutions. Let’s say we change the Eskimo language to some other language. Of course, having made the language substitution I would have to make a cultural substitution as well… but I will do that on the fly as I represent the joke in its new form.

Let’s consider English. I’ve a language close at hand – I assume that since you are reading this you have at least a passing familiarity with the language. I further hope that you have made the same assumption about me. Now that we’ve made the language substitution and we will make the corresponding cultural substitution, let’s make a substitution to the subject of the joke. The subject of the joke is the solid form of precipitation. Let’s substitute liquid in its place and the joke may now go something like this…

Question: Why do the British have ninety words for “rain” in their language?
Answer: Because they need them!

The problem with this is, of course, there aren’t ninety words for rain in English and that is too bad. It would make watching the weather forecast here a little less monotonous. Let’s see, there is the kind of rain that falls in great, gushing torrents, there is the light mist that falls and leaves sheen on the horizontal surfaces without really wetting the vertical ones. There is the stealth rain that a co-worker of mine who was out for two weeks noticed.

“You know” observed Tim as we drove to Stonehenge two weeks ago, “I’ve never seen it rain here but the streets always seem to be wet.”

There are the wonderful fogs that one would expect and the light drizzle. As a matter of fact, the only kind of liquid precipitation that I have not seen here is virga. Virga is a form of precipitation that I had never seen (at least never noticed) until I moved to Colorado. The conditions have to be just right for virga to occur (or so I am told) and to the best of my observation, that would never happen here. Virga is precipitation that evaporates faster than it can fall. It never reaches the ground. If you took a photograph of a rain shower and touched out the lower half of the rainfall so that you had rain obviously falling from the clouds but never hitting the ground, you’d have a picture of virga. The problem is the atmosphere between the ground and the storm needs to be pretty dry which is not something I have witnessed here.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the humidity. As long as it isn’t paired with 90° or better temperatures, I love humidity. Humidity gives us clouds, it gives us the great mosses that grow everywhere here, and it also gives us beautiful sunrises. Which, I believe is where I will leave you for the morning.



This is the Thames from my office.

Have a great day!

Don Bergquist – Thames Ditton, United Kingdom – 15, December, 2004

Editior's Note:

Those of you who have been kindly sending me email containing alternative words for precipitation, thanks! Some of them I have found quite interesting. Some I have never heard of, some I have. My favorite to date is "Mizzle." Although it sounds like something Snoop Doggy-Dog would say, it is apparently a kind of Misty-drizzle to heave to be fog, to light to really be distinguishible drops.

Keep that email coming! But, no matter how many of you send it, I refuse to accept the submission of "DRain" as a serious contender!

djb