The Weather Channel: English Style

Ok, so this post may mainly be for Mom, but as it has been raining here for the past three days, I couldn't help but check weather.com to see when we might have a reprieve...and Dad has been interested in distinctly British terminology, so when our director, Peter McCullough, emailed out the following, I thought I might pass it along to you:

British Weather Terminology

1.) ‘forecast’ -- there is no such thing here as a ‘weather report’. Weather-obsessives are well-catered for by the BBC Weather website, where you can track the various forms of rain on the up-to-the-minute satellite display: http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/ukweather/

2.) ‘sunshine and showers’ -- like yesterday (and the day before that, and the day before that, and . . . ). This is always said with optimism. It is not a bad forecast. It expresses that quintessential British ability to make the best of a bad situation (cf. Dunkirk). Learn to coo about how ‘fresh’ that occasional sprinkle makes things, how the garden sparkles, how the scent of roses hangs better in the air, and to appreciate the fact that the sky is more attractive given the beautiful contrast of clouds (what other nation could produce the paintings of John Constable?).

3.) ‘showers’ -- these are very different from ‘rain’ (the latter being continuous for more than a 30 minute period). Hence, ‘showers’ can be: ‘sharp,’ ‘thundery’ (isn’t that sweet? I love the understatement of the diminutive form), ‘broken’ (i.e., more or less continuous, but not quite), ‘bands of’ (organized version of ‘broken’), frequent,’ ‘occasional,’ ‘fading’ (optimism again), ‘squally’ (another adorable diminutive; hides the fact that these are nasty – heavy rain with high winds), ‘fast-moving’ (less poetic version of ‘squally’), ‘slow-moving’ (this is bad – on a day of ‘sunshine and showers’ you want it to rain only very quickly on your picnic / garden party / walk to the library), ‘beefy’ (a recent addition to the BBC Weather Centre vocabulary; you get really wet in these, and I think that it has something to do with the size of the drops involved) BUT ‘torrential’ is never used to modify ‘showers’; ‘torrential’ for some reason can only modify ‘rain’.

4.) Just in case we ever get to warm weather, what you want to see as a high temperature is 25C. This is hot enough (given the strength of the sun this far north) to make shorts a comfortable possibility. Anything over 28 becomes unbearable, usually because accompanied with humidity. BUT don’t use the word ‘humid’ – the term is ‘close’. This sounds vague, but it’s actually quite evocative and accurate since it captures the sense of foreboding, low black thunderclouds, haze, and oppressive temperature all-in-one. But come to think of it, that all sounds rather attractive at the moment.