11:28am Saturday 26th December 2009
By Chris Lloyd
STANDING at the top of the sledging bank which was sculpted out of the North Yorkshire countryside by the River Tees many millennia ago, I fell to thinking about snow.
The morning’s papers said that Eurostar had been derailed by “fluffy snow”, echoing the risible “wrong kind of snow” that had knocked British Rail off track in 1991.
“This is excellent sledging snow,” said a young fellow sledger. “It’s slippy snow.”
“Usually the sledges cut through to the mud underneath,” said one who’d sledged the hill as man and boy, as had his father, “but this is binding snow, sticking to the grass.”
“But it’s rubbish snowball snow,” said one of the youngsters. “It’s too powdery.”
“Yes,” said another who moments earlier had been telling me how his was a spy-sledge with secret rockets on the sides. “My brother Connor is not coming out because he’s in a bad mood. He spent all morning building an igloo, but can’t get the roof on. He says this snow is no good for igloos.”
So many different qualities of snow, but only one word. A word that is as old as the hills on which we sledge. A word that can be heard in many northern European languages: sneeuw, snjor, snjo, sne, snegas or snieg depending if you are in Holland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Lithuania or Russia.
You could include slush, a yucky-sounding word that perfectly describes the wet, grey, shoe-filling, kerbside gloop. But it is a slangy 17th Century newcomer. From where it came, no one knows, although it would be apt if it were adapted from the Norwegian word slusk, meaning slops.
On my hillside, I presumed that slush-fund derived from the snowy slops. But to 19th Century American sailors, slush was the fatty sludge that was left over after the heavily salted meat had been boiled. Ashore, they sold the slush and spent the fund on luxuries which they shared out.
You could argue that there is sleet, which is partially-thawed falling snow. It’s another ancient word with origins in several Scandinavian languages, as sletta or slud.
If you are allowing falling snow, then you have to include blizzard – thick snow driven by high winds in zero visibility. It is American slang that has been enthusiastically embraced by the English.
Frontiersmen were using “blizzard” in the early 19th Century to mean “a snowless violent storm”. For example, in the 1830s, Davy Crockett was said to be “taking a blizzard at a deer” – firing a hail of bullets. He was also “speaking a blizzard” during a speech – a torrential outpouring of words.
In April 1871, OC Bates, editor of the Northern Vindicator newspaper in Estherville, Iowa, needed to describe a meteorological phenomenon encountered by English-speakers for the first time. Violent snowstorms swept across the vast prairies, killing exposed travellers. They died, he wrote, like Crockett spoke, in a blizzard.
Other languages, of course, have a blizzard of words for snow, most famously the Inuit of Greenland and northern America who clag ideas together to create brilliant descriptions.
Qanipalaat is feathery clumps of falling snow. Taiga is soft, deep snow requiring snowshoes for walking. Aniusarpok is snow that a dog eats. Qali is snow on the branches of a tree. Ayak is snow on clothes; tiluktorpok is snow that beaten from clothes.
For Connor, pukaangajuq is the best snow for building an igloo.
But not even the Inuit have a word for “snow which has made our Christmas”.
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