A Winter Dictionary (Bookshop|Amazon) by Paul Anthony Jones includes some words to lift your spirits. The verb whicken involves the lengthening of days in springtime, a variant of quicken, meaning “come to life.” Another word, breard, is an old term...
Zooming down a snow-covered hill on a wooden structure with runners goes by many names across North America including sledding, sliding, sleighing, coasting, and tobogganing. In parts of the United States, it’s also called sleigh riding, and no...
In Norway, a popular bit of advice translates as “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.” It’s sometimes given as “Det finst ikkje dårleg vêr, berre dårlege klede” and the idiom is also used in Finland. This is part of a complete...
What do you call the dirty frozen solid pack of brown snow that gets jammed in the wheel of a car in certain parts of the world during winter? Try crud, fenderbergs, carnacles, snow goblins, tire turds, or chunkers. This is part of a complete...
David points out that a turtle tucked away for the winter may not be hibernating in the mammalian sense: reptiles are often said to brumate. The distinction is not universally insisted on, but brumation usually refers to a reptile’s winter dormancy...
Did you ever wonder why we capitalize the pronoun “I,” but not any other pronoun? Also, the romantic story behind the term halcyon days, the origin of the phrase “like white on rice,” and the linguistic scuttlebutt on the word scuttlebutt. Plus, a...
