Particularly in the Southern United States, there are lots of fanciful terms for “a sudden, heavy rain” that involve the downpour’s after-effects. For starters, there’s gully-washer, frog-strangler, toad-strangler, toadfrog-strangler, fish-drownder, goose-drownder, frog-drownder, chicken-drownder, fence-lifter, bridge-lifter, trash-mover, trash-floater, chunk-mover, stump-mover, gully-buster, gulley-maker, and gully-hopper. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Awash in Heavy Rain Language”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Mark from historic Yorktown, Virginia.
Yorktown, Virginia. Welcome. How are you doing, Mark?
I’m doing just great, thanks.
And I heard a term that I’d never heard before.
I heard it from a friend of mine whose family’s lived here for five generations.
And the term is, it’s a frog strangler.
Evidently, you’d heard it from his father quite a number of years back.
And this area is kind of marshy, swampy.
You know, this region near coastal Virginia.
I’m familiar with the term the gully washer from out west, you know, southwest.
You know, a lot of rain usually going down like a ravine or something like that.
But he tells me frog strangler isn’t rushing water.
It’s just kind of like when they’ve had a lot of rain and now the waters are rising in a swampy area.
And there’s been so much of it that it’s a frog strangler.
There are lots of terms like that for a heavy rain, a frog strangler, a toad strangler.
I don’t know if you’ve heard that one.
No, I have not.
And the combined toad frog strangler.
Yeah, and they all have to do with the effect of a heavy rain, which you suggested.
In the Midwest, sometimes you’ll hear a heavy rain called a goose drownder or even a fish drownder, which I think must be just an incredible rain.
A chicken drowneder or a frog drowneder.
And they all have to do with the effect of the rain.
And a gully washer, as you suggested, is the same kind of thing.
It adds more water to a gully, which is a trench or a channel in the earth that’s made by running water.
But you’re distinguishing between a gully washer and a frog strangler?
Right.
This area is really low-lying.
It’s kind of marshy, swampy.
There’s not really any hills here.
And so his family always used it.
Their meaning of it was that there’s been a lot of rain, and now the water is rising even within the swamps.
And, you know, there’s a few little higher areas within a swamp or a marsh that typically aren’t inundated with water.
And so, you know, this is starting to show that the water level is really coming up there.
Yeah.
I mean, as far as I know, it just refers to a very, very heavy rain.
And often one that comes on really suddenly and just, you know, nobody’s prepared for it, not even the frogs.
We get those.
They’re terrible thunderstorms.
Yeah, exactly.
There are other terms for those kinds of rains, like a fence lifter or a bridge lifter.
It’s just all about the effect.
A trash mover or a trash floater.
Yeah, the chunk mover or the stump mover.
Yeah, and there are lots of variations on the gully washer, too.
Gully Buster, Gully Maker, Gully Whopper, Gully Cutter.
The South, for some reason, tends to have a lot of these.
The Strangler and Mover ones seem to be very Southern.
Yeah.
So you hadn’t heard that one before, huh, Mark?
I had not.
I just couldn’t miss the opportunity to share it with others because it was just one I had never come across in my many years and travels.
Yeah, it’s pretty picturesque, huh?
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you for calling, Mark.
Thanks for sharing that story.
And thank you for allowing me to share it with the rest of your audience.
I’ve been a long time listening.
I really love the show.
Thank you, Mark.
Thank you very much.
We appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.
