This weekend is gludder-fleeting
HOW to describe the weather this coming weekend? Sunshine and showers, according to the Met Office.
But those two words, of course, do not really do it justice. They are baggy, loose-fitting things to describe the infinite vagaries of our climate. Like wrapping a diamond in an old sock.
This is a problem that extends well beyond the weather bulletins. Every year we report on the new – often tech-related – words that have made it into the Oxford Dictionary, but what about the ones that have slipped out of common parlance?
As we grow more detached from our nature and climate the language we use to describe it is becoming ever more simplified.
Research published this week by Dr Selin Kesebir, assistant professor of organisational behaviour at the London Business School, has found that words relating to nature became significantly more commonplace between 1900 and the Second World War, but have been in marked decline ever since.
The study of 6,000 song lyrics, 274,000 film synopses and several million books suggested that many words associated with nature were simply vanishing.
Perhaps that is no surprise when a 2002 survey suggested that British primary school children could name more Pokémon characters than common plants and animals – and that was before the advent of Netflix.
We must do our best to preserve the glorious climatic lexicon of English (historically this country has more than 50 words to describe rain alone) before it disappears for good. If we lose the words to describe it properly then we lose touch with our landscape altogether.
So, allow me to re-frame this weekend’s weather forecast, borrowing a phrase suggested by the Cambridge academic and writer, Robert Macfarlane, who is working to redress our lapsing natural vocabulary.
“Gludder-fleeting”, meaning sunshine between showers. And further into Scotland there might even be “roarie-bummlers” – although I shall not spoil the surprise for our readers north of the border by revealing precisely what that entails.