Shreep around witches’ knickers? Weather words raised from the dead
Academic campaigns to revive outdated terms for nature and places to foster respect for our landscapes
THE British are famously obsessed with talking about the weather – but one expert has claimed that we still do not do it enough.
Robert Macfarlane, a Cambridge academic, says the language we use to describe the weather and the world around us has narrowed – and he is determined to reverse that process.
While some imaginative phrases such as “it’s raining cats and dogs” are still in use, many others have died out and Mr Macfarlane has spent two years researching them. These “dead” words describing the great British weather will now be celebrated in an exhibition he has curated at William Wordsworth’s childhood home in Cockermouth. It will use pictures to describe words drawn from dialects across the UK.
Wordsworth, the Lake District poet, wrote extensively about the weather in the countryside around his home in Cumbria, including in his poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. Mr Macfarlane, a nature writer who teaches English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, said: “I spent two years gathering as many of our place terms and nature words as possible, from more than 30 languages and dialects around Britain and Ireland, and then releasing them back into imaginative circulation. Without words, the landscape can easily become a blandscape: generalised, indifferent, unobserved.”
The exhibition follows his 2015 book Landmarks, which explored dialect connected to nature, terrain and the weather. The photographs accompanying the words were taken by Mr Macfarlane’s parents Rosamund and John Macfarlane.
According to a 2015 survey, 94 per cent of us have had a conversation about the weather in the past six hours – but we are unlikely to have used any of Mr Macfarlane’s words.
They include shreep, an East Anglian word for mist clearing slowly, and sun- scald, a Sussex word for a patch of bright sunlight on water.
He has also revived expressions describing other, less natural, phenomena including currick, a Cumbrian word for a man-made pile of stones used to guide travellers, and “Witches’ knickers”, an Irish expression referring to plastic snagged in a tree.
The exhibition, at the National Trust property Wordsworth House, opens today.