In the early 19th Century, a shy British chemist named Luke Howard self-published a pamphlet called Essay on the Modifications of Clouds, which proposed a taxonomy of cloud formations. To his surprise, the pamphlet captured the public imagination, turned Howard into a reluctant celebrity, and inspired artists from the German writer Goethe to the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Latin terms Howard proposed for various types of clouds, such as cirrus, stratus, and cumulus, are still in use today. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Names of Clouds”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. Born in London in 1772, Luke Howard was a shy chemist who was also really fascinated by weather and particularly by clouds. He wanted to organize how we understand and observe those ever-changing formations up in the sky, and he wanted to do it in a way that was scientific.
And in 1803, he self-published a pamphlet that he called On the Modifications of Clouds, etc. In it, he proposed a classification system for clouds, and he drew on his schoolboy Latin and came up with the main categories, which were cirrus, stratus, and cumulus.
Now, cirrus comes from the Latin for hair or tendril. Stratus comes from the Latin for layer, and cumulus is like a pile, you know, like accumulate. And this new way of looking at clouds and these new names and this whole new language for talking about something that everybody had always seen but never really classified that way, it hit a nerve in the popular imagination.
And Luke Howard became this reluctant scientific celebrity. His nomenclature was championed by some of the greatest minds of his time, especially the influential German poet Goethe. Goethe went so far as to write poems based on those names. And some people criticized Howard for using Latin rather than everyday spoken English.
And Goethe wrote a passionate response on Howard’s behalf. And he argued that those Latin cloud names should be accepted in all languages. They should not be translated because in that way, the first intention of the inventor and founder of them is destroyed. And he even went on to send Howard gushing fan mail, which is kind of hard to imagine today.
The story of all of this is told by historian Richard Hamblin in the book The Invention of Clouds, How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies. And in fact, if you go to his home in London, there’s a historical marker that says Luke Howard, namer of clouds, lived and died here.
Oh, that’s so nice. Namer of clouds. This is what we all dream of when we come up with a word. We want acclaim, recognition, acknowledgement.
Right. We want to be a part of history. Right. And he got that.
Gerda is your fan? Yeah, I know, right? I’m imagining him like dotting his eyes with hearts as he sends letters to Howard.
Yeah, forget the umlauts. Yeah, I never knew that story. I just thought some scientist came up with these names, but we still use them today.
Yeah, absolutely. And they’re not intact in other languages, right? They are modified to fit the different languages that they’ve been borrowed into, right?
Actually, I don’t know. There’s a pretty clear system of classification of clouds, and I don’t know. So I like how it plugs into the development of meteorology as a science, where we started to realize that some of those old saws about the red sky or whatever had a little bit of truth. And we could look at the sky to see what was going to happen a little later with our weather.
Exactly. Trace the sky with a painter’s brush. The winds around you soon will rush.
Talking about cirrus clouds. Yeah. And what I also love about this is that it was a way of using language to impose order on something that didn’t seem to have any order. It seems that Luke Howard was someone who saw differences in clouds and saw patterns and indeed began meteorology that way.
I have often thought that if there were another species on this planet that had the same kind of active intelligence as humans, that they might actually call us a word that means the classifiers. Because that is so much of what humans do. We sort, we organize, we classify.
And if you were to think about our primary behavior, a lot of it has to do with that, the things that we say, the things that we produce, how we organize ourselves and our communities. It’s about setting these boundaries and saying, this is a box and all of the things of this type go in that box.
Oh, you’re right. Right. The classifiers. I really like that. And, of course, language is key to that, right? Making sense of the world. We love language.
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