It has been snowing all day. There's some language, isn't there, that's alleged to have 150 different words for snow? In English we have lots of words to differentiate types of rain, but not nearly enough vocabulary for snow. When it rains we can say it's spitting, or drizzling; sheeting or pouring; bucketing down. There might be drips and drops; or a sprinkling; a downpour or a deluge. It rains cats and dogs! But we seem to have very few really expressive snow words: it's light or heavy, a flurry or a blizzard...and that's about it.
Unless you know better? Do we have a special word or phrase for the snow equivalent of constant drizzle? What's it called when it falls all day in sizeable flakes, but not so heavily as to be a blizzard? We talk about slush, but what about that intermediate stage when the snow, which started out too powdery to handle, melts just enough to become good building material?
Why don't we have more words for snow, when plenty of the English-speaking world (like our corner of it, today) does have experience of the stuff?
There's the "wrong sort"
ReplyDelete