The word cloud comes from Old English clūd, meaning “rock” or “hill,” making it a relative of the word clod. The sense of a “hill” or “mass of rocks” was later applied to those vaporous hills in the sky. This is part of a complete episode...
Jacob in Frankfort, Kentucky, remembers that on foggy mornings in Appalachia, he’d hear grownups say that the groundhogs are making coffee. Writer Jesse Stuart, who served as Kentucky’s Poet Laureate in the mid-1950s, wrote evocatively about how on...
Claggy, a regional UK weather word, originally meant a thick, low-level cloud, damp, overcast, foggy, or misty. Because it comes from an old word having to do with sticky things, it also came to describe air that feels unpleasantly close and humid...
The threat I’m going to cloud up and rain all over you goes back to at least 1911. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Ima Cloud Up and Rain” We heard from Keith Johnston in Rosemead, California, and he writes, A phrase my father used...
Luke Howard’s Essay on the Modifications of Clouds gave English writers and artists a new Latin vocabulary for classifying clouds, and its influence reached John Constable and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s poem The Cloud turns a cloud into an “I”...
The slang of paragliding includes the terms cus, pronounced like “cues,” and cumies, also known as cumulus clouds, which indicate good lift is available. For paragliders, the term cloud street refers to a line of cumulus clouds that stretches for...