‘100 Words for Rain’ by Alex Johnson

Rain, rain, go away! Come again another day!

British weather, eh! Who would have it? March this year, though rainy and dismal, was not in fact the rainiest March on record. That happened in 1947. But now that spring is springing upon us fast, it’s been a delight to delve, pre-publication, into a book which bravely brandishes the R-word in its title: this Thursday 11 April, Collins publishes Alex Johnson’s 100 Words for Rain, a National Trust book.

I read it on screen. But you, dear reader, will have the tactile and possibly olfactory advantage of handling a physical book, which I urge you to order forthwith – or as soon as you’ve finished reading this post, anyway.

Quiz time!

Meanwhile, to whet your appetite, here’s a mini-quiz: a) What’s a Brocken spectre? b) why would Queen Elizabeth I have approved of a ULEZ? c) which was the wettest day in the UK since records began? d) who wrote, ‘It was raining. A fine rain, a gentle shower, was peppering the pavements and making them greasy. Was it worthwhile opening an umbrella?’ and e) what does it mean weatherwise if a cat sneezes?

Talking about the weather is, proverbially, how Brits break the ice with strangers, what we obsess about as farmers, gardeners, builders, sailors, birders or hikers, and so forth, 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[ecially] temperature, cloudiness, and rainfall, affecting a specific place.’ Erm. Well, yes and no.

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 – and you and me. 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.

Cows, cats and dolphins?

I say ‘fancies’ because there’s a chapter on folklore with some delightful anecdotes, among which I particularly enjoyed the notion from an 1869 book, Weather Lore, that ‘when cats sneeze, it’s a sign of rain’. It certainly trumps the old cows-lying-down-forecasts-rain for quirkiness. (Spoiler alert: cows being forecasters is ‘hogwash’.) Another supposed predictor is, ‘If dolphins are seen to leap and toss, fine weather may be expected, and the wind will blow from the quarter in which they are seen.’ Great for mariners and some coast-dwellers, but not too handy elsewhere.

Spooky!

Words being my thing, I was continually entertained by discovering and savouring all sorts of new-to-me ones. I can guarantee you’ll have the same experience. What, for example, is an antifogmatic? (To be revealed at the bottom of this post.) I certainly had no idea there was such a thing as a fogbow, a sort of spectral white rainbow that can form in fog. Shades of Dracula! (Who does indeed make an appearance in the chapter titled ‘Fog’, and we’ll come to that in a minute.) Equally spOOky-sounding and Hammer-Horrorful is a Brocken spectre, a phenomenon that can occur when you’re high up on a peak somewhere with the sun at your back and clouds in front and a humungous image of YOU is projected onto the clouds.

Old women and sticks

Now, what about those 100 Words for Rain of the title? It’s self-evidently a riff on the famous canard that Inuit have a hundred/hundreds of words for snow. Sure enough, in the ‘Rain’ chapter the author duly unveils his 100 words. These are mostly regional or dialect words for (types of) rain, while some few are simply rain-related, for instance pluviophile, a rain-lover, or wetchered, which is what you are after being soaked in a downpour and a good description of how one would feel. I suspect many of you will enjoy seeking out your local words for rain in this chapter and in the one on ‘Regional Weather’. Among the dozens of words for types of rain, I was struck by a cow-quaker, ‘a storm in May after the cows have gone back into the fields (so heavy it makes them “quake”)’. The bovine equivalent of a knee-trembler, perhaps? And no listing of rain expressions would be complete without the Welsh equivalent of raining cats and dogs: Mae hi’n brwr hen wragedd a ffyn – It’s raining old women and sticks.

And talking of rain words, Alex Johnson waxes lyrical about petrichor, the pleasant odour caused by rain falling on dry ground after a prolonged spell of warm weather. That’s a blend of Classical Greek petra, ‘rock’, and a word you won’t often come across in English unless you’re reading Homer, ‘ichor’, the fluid that supposedly stood for blood in the veins of the gods. A more linguistically transparent blend he mentions is thundersnow.

A literary jaunt as well

Many an author populates the book’s pages in informative guise, from Charles Dickens to Thomas Hardy, Dr Johnson to George Eliot, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to James Joyce. Who knew that Virginia Woolf was a bit of a weather nerd? The extract in the mini-quiz is from her novel The Years. Or that Dr Johnson helped set a cliché in motion when he opined in 1758 that, ‘when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.’ (I apologise on his behalf for the gender bias; in his day it was still respectable to subsume all humanity under the male sex.) Before the ‘Fog’ chapter, I placed a bet with myself that the ‘fog stanza’ of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ would appear – ‘The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes …’. It did, but so did several other savourable snippets, including one from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

One of the later chapters deals with how climate affects us. National Trust attendance tends to peak when the thermometer hits 24⁰C; when the temperature rises by 10⁰C, demand for burgers rockets by 300 per cent. All in all, from pub quiz fodder to literary facts and fascinating insights into aspects of the weather that haven’t occurred to you (or to me), 100 Words for Rain is pure gold. Or, as Francis Bacon put it rather more soberly, ‘Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.’ 100 Words for Rain actually covers all those bases.

Quiz answers:

a) Brocken spectre: that spooky, much larger-than-life image mentioned earlier.

b) Queen Elizabeth I (reigned 1558–1603) was ‘greatly grieved and annoyed with the taste and smoke of sea-coales’ in London. That is, smoke from the many coal-fired domestic and industrial hearths.

c) The UK’s wettest day: Saturday 23 October 2020.

d) Virginia Woolf wrote that extract.

e) If a cat sneezes, it’s a sign of rain.

AND …

Antifogmatic: ‘a drink to buck you up before setting out into an urban fog.’

By Jeremy Butterfield
Jeremy Butterfield is the former Editor-in-Chief of Collins Dictionaries, and editor of the fourth, revised edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.