Words and Stuff
When I hear that someone has been on a journey, a metaphorical one that is, I inwardly groan: it’s almost always a tale of tedium. But sometimes I discover words through a journey of a kind – an account of an event or an observation that uses an unfamiliar expression. This is roughly how I have recently come to learn a little about cloud words.
The words here have nothing to do with the ‘cloud’ that stores enormous amounts of digital data, nor do they refer to cloud nine or even to seventh heaven. They have reached me, more mundanely, via the warm, wet blanket of grey cloud that seems to have hung over England for most of the past six months, punctuated by gales and storms. In some of the – few – interludes, it has paid off to raise one’s eyes from mud and flood and look up at some unusual cloud formations. I won’t pretend to have seen them, but others have, and their reports have considerably widened my cloud vocabulary.
Ever since humans first slithered out of the sea, they must have had names for clouds. Even today a few cloud-related terms are recorded among the dialects of the British Isles. In Orkney, a ‘gamfer’ (from the Icelandic word for a ‘troop of witches riding through the air’) describes the appearance of clouds before a storm. And when the sky is mostly overcast but contains some glittering clouds, they are ‘glamsy-like’ or ‘skyran’, two words rooted in Norse. In Essex, a cloud that broadens out as it rises from the horizon is called a ‘Noah’s ark’ and elsewhere a ‘dintless’ sky is a cloudless one. We’re all familiar with a ‘mackerel’ sky and sometimes we see an ‘anvil’, but most of us have few names drawn from English to describe different clouds.
The names we use – if we use them at all – we owe, I learn, to Luke Howard, a Quaker pharmacist of the late-18th and early-19th century. Howard had something in common with Basil Fotherington-tomas, the effeminate, mid-20th-century creation of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle in Down with Skool, who went about saying, ‘Hullo clouds, hullo sky.’ Howard did much the same, having early in life developed a passion for gazing out of the window. But Howard had a tidy mind, a flair for observation and the ambition to promote the usefulness of meteorology through the study of clouds. And for this a classification was needed.
His solution was to divide clouds into seven groups, to which he gave Latin names: cirrus, cumulus, stratus, cirrocumulus, cirrostratus, cumulostratus and cumulocirrostratus or nimbus. (‘Stratus’ wasn’t strictly a Latin noun, but ‘stratum’ had already been bagged by geologists.)
Howard’s classification of 1802 soon caught on abroad and, remarkably, is still in use today. A Frenchman, Jean-baptiste Lamarck, had proposed something similar just before Howard, but his scheme was complicated and his cloud names were French. They went nowhere.
Additions have been made to take account of peculiarities, such as those seen this winter in British skies. The blanket of fluffy pockets that in January caused so much twittering in West Wittering were just cumulostratus clouds, though in an unusual formation. But the wave-like clouds above Newport in February were ‘fluctus’ or ‘KelvinHelmholtz’. And Storm Ciara a day or two later filled the heavens over North Yorkshire with an infinity of drooping udders – ‘mammatus’ clouds – which presumably threatened the locals with a flood of milk. Goethe, who so admired Howard’s work that he wrote a poem with a verse for each of his cloud categories, would surely have had something to say about that.