A listener from California says her family’s way of remarking on rain is to mention the space between falling drops. So a 12-inch rain means there’s about a foot between one drop and the next. Tricky, huh? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Space Between Rain Drops”
We’ve talked on the show before about words for various types of rain, like toad strangler, gully washer, that kind of thing.
Which prompted Judy Einboden to write us.
She lives in the dry Mojave Desert here in California.
And she writes, my dad used to describe our sparse rainstorms by letting you know how far apart the raindrops were.
So we could have a very light rain, which would be, we had a 12-inch rain or extremely sparse.
We had a three-foot rain, meaning the drops were 12 inches apart or three feet apart or not 12 inches of rain.
Interesting.
So not depth, but the space between the falling drops.
Yeah.
She said it always makes people think twice when you describe rainfall that way.
Three feet of rain.
Yeah.
We wish in Northern California, right?
Maybe it would spread out over a week.
Not all at once.
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