Snotty Weather

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Pat from San Diego.

Hiya, Pat, what’s going on?

I just had a question that I was interested in relating to the weather out here when we’re fishing offshore in San Diego.

Sunny and clear.

Yeah, sunny and clear right now.

But sometimes the ocean acts up a bit and people out here will refer to it as snotty weather.

By acting up, you mean what exactly?

Well, usually we’ll be talking about rather large swells and maybe white caps and wind getting above 10, 15 knots in that range.

I’m digging around here, and I find some uses of snotty in this way from 1985.

I have no doubt that it’s earlier.

And all of the uses are pretty consistent with what you have to say.

It doesn’t require that it be cold.

It doesn’t seem to mean weather that will put snot on your face.

But there is a certain amount in the sailor tradition of personifying the weather as an opponent or somebody who does not wish you well.

And I’m wondering here, and I don’t see any direct evidence of this, but I’m wondering here if it’s just not like an extension of the idea of the weather as an entity, you know, this being or creature or some kind of spirit.

And maybe you can give it traits.

You can say that it has traits that are human-like, like being snotty, which might be, in this case, unhelpful or haughty or uncaring or disdainful.

Yeah.

I’ve got to say, the sailing slang and the sailing language is always interesting to me.

And Patrick, I want to thank you for sharing this one with us.

This is pretty cool.

Snotty weather.

Yeah.

Well, we’ll keep our ears out for that.

I love that.

I wonder, Grant, do you think this term is going to make landfall?

We’ll have people in landlocked states using it on the nightly news.

Yeah, yeah, traffic reports, you know.

There’s a lot of congestion because of the snotty weathers.

I don’t know.

Maybe, I don’t know.

Maybe.

Yeah, it’s a little relative, too.

I heard it on Deadliest Catch the other day, that television show on Discovery, the Discovery Channel.

And there, you know, they were in the Bering Sea, and there was 20-foot swells.

And the wind was just blowing the top off of the waves.

And, you know, they showed this 100-foot boat going up and down and up and down.

And sure enough, you know, the deckhand just looked out using foul weather gear and goes, yep, the ocean’s a bit snotty today.

Understatement, right?

That’s fabulous.

All right.

Stupendous, Patrick.

Thank you so much, and good fishing.

All right.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Snotty weather.

I loved it.

I love your idea of the ocean being personified.

I’m imagining those maps where you have the winds in the four corners and there’s these faces with these puffed-up cheeks, right, trying to blow you off course.

And red noses, yeah.

Sure, sure.

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