A Lowry Day

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is Irv Cummings calling.

Hello, Irv. Welcome to the show.

Where are you calling us from, Irv?

Thank you. I’m calling from Putnam Station, New York.

Putnam Station, New York. Well, welcome to the show. How can we help?

I’d like to know the background and some information on the word Lowry.

It’s a word that my mother used to use, and she used it to describe a damp and cloudy day.

Can you give us an example of how she’d say it?

She would say, it looks Lowry out.

Oh, I see.

Or, this is a Lowry day.

I see. And how would you guess that she was spelling that?

My guess is L-O-W-R-Y, but I never saw it in writing, so I have no idea.

-huh. Well, that makes sense because what you would see in writing is L-O-W-E-R-I-N-G.

And that word is usually pronounced lowering. I always pronounced it lowering whenever I saw it,

which wasn’t that often. It seems to be a word that isn’t that commonly used.

Poets seem to like it a lot. If you’re talking about a Lowry day or a Lowry sky,

they’re gloomy and dark and kind of foreboding.

Yes, exactly.

We don’t really know much about the etymology of this word.

It probably goes back to some kind of Germanic word that has to do with frowning or lying stealthily in wait or something like that.

But it’s usually spelled L-O-W-E-R-I-N-G.

Sometimes it’s spelled L-A-U-R-I-N-G, lowering.

And there is a verb, L-O-W-E-R, or L-O-U-R, to lower, which means to frown or to scowl.

You can talk about a person’s face as they’re lowering.

Lowering.

Yeah.

And there’s a tiny bit of folklore around this from a book of New England folklore,

A Lowry Day, A Lowry Bride.

And they’re talking about the wedding day.

So if a bride’s day is dark and gloomy, that means that she’s going to be dark and gloomy and it doesn’t bode well for the marriage.

Oh, my goodness.

Thank you so much for taking my call.

Our pleasure.

Call us again sometime.

I will.

All right.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

One of those real lovely, just lovely words that when you encounter it in fiction, you pause for a moment.

Right.

Because you just know that the person that used it is a literate type.

Yes.

They’ve run across it.

They’ve stashed it away and presented it to you at just the right moment in just the right way.

Yes, the dark, lowering, foreboding sky.

It reminds me of the word gloaming.

Whenever I see the word gloaming, you know, in the gloaming, same kind of word.

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