A listener shared a story in our Facebook group about hearing the term lazy wind, which refers to the kind of wind that’s so bitterly cold that it seems to go straight through you, rather than going around you. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “A Lazy Wind”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. On our Facebook page, Rose Carbonella described a cold, blustery day that she spent in the mountains of Virginia. And she was photographing with a group of people from the UK. And she writes, one of the gentlemen in the group turned to me and said, this is what we call a lazy wind. It goes through you instead of around you. That’s nice. A lazy wind. Oh, I know those winds. Yeah, right? And this phrase goes back a couple hundred years, a lazy wind. I love it when the language has the jokes embedded in it that still work after all that time.
And it’s so descriptive, too. You know that feeling when that wind just goes right through you. It makes me think of Chicago more than Virginia. Is there anything that makes you feel more insignificant than the weather that pays you no mind?
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