Grice: The Hyetal Conversations

--- by JLS
----- for the GC

--- KRAMER, KENNEDY and me (SPERANZA) are discussing rain. Kramer uses 'precipitate'. (precipitation). Kennedy argued that 'rain' is a misnomer in Guatemalan (his girlfriend speaks various languages). This from today's Quinion, World Wide Words:

"The hydrologic cycle has undergone an atmospheric
mutation here. They don't measure the rain in inches but
in feet. A waterproofing contractor could definitely find
happiness here, while rainmakers and dousers would
quickly go out of business. This is the kind of place
where words like pluviose, hyetal, and affusion actually
belong in conversation.

[The Washington Post, 4 March 1990]


Quinion comments on "hyetal": "You may wish to save this adjective for a rainy day, when you can enliven the inevitable discussion about the weather by dropping it
into the conversation. Do not, however, expect it to be understood, even though you're merely referring to rain. The Oxford English Dictionary, my first stop in investigating our language, has no examples of it at all in its entry (written about
110 years ago), noting only that it is recorded in the 1864 edition
of Webster's Dictionary. ... "Hyetal" comes from Greek "huetos", rain, and is related to Greek "hyei", it is raining. It means "relating to rain". A hyetal chart is a rain chart; an isohyetal is a line on a map connecting places of equal rainfall; a hyetograph is a self-registering rain gauge; and hyetology is the study of the geographical variation and annual distribution of rainfall."

It's the final passage that combines nicely with Kramer's and Kennedy's comments:

Meteorologists, the main users of the word and its compounds, have extended the meaning to include all forms of precipitation

---- including solid water, i.e. hail -- as in Carroll, "Hunting of the Snark", -- the beaver was life insured from storms or hails, as I remember (misremember).

-- It also connects with Putnam, The taste of twater. As Geary has remarked elsewhere: 'ice' is NOT water -- I disagree and would call and have called 'ice' "frozen water". "By the same token, you may miscall 'water' 'liquid ice', which ain't". The crunch comes with steam which is atomospheric ice AND water -- rolled into one. Etc.

(Oddly, a feature in NYT blog, "Talk deeply, be happy" disparages talk about the weather as unphilosophical -- but see this BLOG). Etc.