Sky vs. Skies

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Rob from Moorhead, Minnesota.

Hi, Rob. How are you doing?

Pretty good. How are you?

All right. Welcome to the show. How can we help?

Well, I am a TV meteorologist.

And when I was in college, I had an instructor who insisted that we only use the singular sky as opposed to skies.

His rationale was there is only one sky.

So you would never say, we’ll see sunny skies today.

We will see a sunny sky.

So I’m just curious, at stations I’ve worked at, we’ve had a big debate about what we should use to say sky or skies.

How interesting.

And where do you come down?

You know, I have always, it was kind of drilled into my brain in college, so I always have deferred to sky.

Is that right?

So you’ve never flown the friendly skies of United or, you know?

Right, and I know that was big in their ad campaign as well, but I’ve always stuck with sky.

And it sounds funny because most people will say, you know, skies will be sunny tomorrow.

It’s pretty common.

You hear it on the Weather Channel, a lot of other weather reports, but I’ve always gone with the singular.

I think you keyed in on it when you said it feels right to say skies sometimes.

Wouldn’t you agree, Grant?

Yeah, there are a lot of reasons to use skies here.

In places like San Diego County, where we are right now recording our show, we do have skies.

We have different weather because the skies over the mountains might be dropping snow and the skies over the beaches might be sunny.

Oh, my gosh.

And the skies in between might have fog.

And that’s at the same time.

Yep.

So we do have different skies here.

And skies is plural.

And the other thing is there’s an etymology story here that was worth talking about.

Right, Martha?

Do you remember this one?

A very interesting etymology story because sky originally meant cloud.

Yeah.

In the Middle Ages, sky could mean either clouds or the firmament, that vast space.

Or the literal heavens, the place that you ascend to when you die, or the place that holds God or the gods.

Yeah, it comes from an old Norse word spelled the same way that means cloud.

So it’s got an interesting history behind it.

So there’s a hanging on here from the 1300s onward of the use of skies to refer to everything above the ground, regardless of what it is or where it is or how many of them or how big are that.

But that is a good point.

My viewing area is about the size of Ohio here.

We have, we cover thousands of square miles.

So it is true that the sky conditions would be different across the viewing area.

There we go.

So this conforms to what we see in the pragmatics of the use of the word skies related to this sort of thing.

The pragmatics, that’s all the stuff that surrounds a usage that isn’t about meaning necessarily, but it adds to the context of it.

So, for example, in skies, we use skies in English if we’re talking about the sky over multiple places at the same time.

When we’re talking about a sky at different times, so it is skies because the morning sky and the evening sky could be different skies.

And when we’re thinking about more than the sky that we can see right now in front of us.

I’m thinking about the skies over America are beautiful.

But the thing is, they’re different everywhere.

I’ve got snow here and rain there and a hurricane coming up over there.

It’s different.

So you could easily say North Dakota skies, but maybe you would only say Fargo sky, because Fargo is a much smaller area with kind of one consistent thing happening, right?

I see.

Well, it may be tough now to break the habit of going to sink the sky.

I’ve got to say, if you avoid saying skies, I think you’re totally fine.

But I would also argue this is another case of overreach by a professor.

Rob, this is fascinating.

We’re so glad you called.

All right.

Thanks for the help.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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