1. THE CHANGING SEASONS
In the northern hemisphere at least, winter begins at the winter solstice when the Earth reaches its maximum tilt on its axis and so slants our part of the world to its furthest point away from the sun. We experience this as the shortest day of the year - around 21 or 22 December - after which the three long months of winter officially commence.
On a more personal scale, we will have felt the oncoming winter for a fair few weeks before this. The leaves on the trees change colour and then fall. Birds that only spend the summer with us prepare to migrate, and then depart. The winds pick up, the rain starts to fall, and day by day the temperatures cool and the turbulent skies darken. The very first wintry nip in the air is usually felt when the calendar tells us it is still autumn.
This period of change and seasonal upheaval is the subject of this first set of wintertime words, from the increasingly stormy weather to the jittery behaviour of our migratory wildlife.
abscission (n.) the process by which a leaf detaches from its tree in autumn [1887; < Lat. abscindere, 'to cut off, to separate']
In general terms abscission is just the act of detaching or cutting something away, and in the five centuries or so that the word has been in use it has been applied to everything from surgical procedures to religious excommunication. In botanical terms, though, abscission is the natural shedding of a part of a plant or tree - like a ripened fruit, a flower lost after pollination or a withered autumn leaf. The precise point at which a leaf breaks away from its tree is called the abscission zone.
See also marcescent
afterlight (n.) the glow that remains in the sky after the sun has set [1683]
As the sun's rays begin to fade a little earlier each day in the autumn, you might find yourself still busy out of doors or on your way home with only their afterlight in the sky.
The evening of the year!. . . The hours wane quickly into shadow, and a chilliness as of the night wind is upon the earth. Sometimes a summer day peeps in here and there like the after-light of the sun, but its aspect is out of season, and it greets us with a melancholy beauty.
E. H. Chapin, 'Seasons of Meditation', The Rose of Charon (1850)
akering-time (n.) the autumn; in particular, the period in late autumn when oak trees start to drop their acorns [dial., 1883; < aker, 'acorn']
The 'akering' here is just a dialect alteration of acorning, the collecting or gathering of acorns, which have long been used as meal to fatten pigs ahead of the winter. Likewise, akermast is the collective name for all the fallen fruit of an oak tree lying on the forest floor.
backendish (adj.) of the weather, rough and stormy [dial., 1898; < back end, 'the rearmost part' + -ish]
A word used to describe weather that seems quite literally appropriate for the 'back end' of the year - so something well worth remembering in the ever wetter and windier final weeks of autumn. Or, in Britain at least, much of the rest of the year.
big eye (n.) sleeplessness or insomnia, caused or worsened by changes in the length of the day [1958; ? < the wide open eyes of a sleepless person]
This twentieth-century coinage was invented by insomniac polar scientists struggling to deal with the extreme and prolonged changes of night and day in Antarctica. The seasonal change might not be quite so severe in our part of the world, but it can still be discombobulating to find the sky completely dark at four o'clock in the afternoon (and still just as dark at eight o'clock the following morning).
blewse (n.) a bluish morning's mist [dial., 1887; < 'blues']
Seemingly nothing more than a dialect adjustment of 'blues', blewse mists are apparently common in the late summer and early autumn when, as a sign of things to come, the temperature suddenly drops overnight following a cloudlessly sunny day.
Blewse. . . A bluish mist, not unusual in summer when the temperature suddenly becomes chilled, the sky remaining cloudless. It is supposed to bring a blight.
F. B. Zincke, Some Materials for the History of Wherstead (1887)
chirming (n., v.) the subdued twittering of birds before a storm [dial., 1846; < OE cirm]
The intermingled sound of different birds' songs has been known as chirming since Old English times, but by the nineteenth century the more specific and more evocative meaning above had emerged in a handful of English dialects. 'The melancholy under-tone of a bird previous to a storm' is how one Victorian dictionary defined a chirm, making this the perfect word for the restless and eerily restrained chirruping of birds as they are forced to take shelter during the squally autumn months.
corner-frost (n.) a very faint or early frost, occurring outside of or long before the wintertime [1898]
An unseasonably early or only very slight frost can be known as a corner-frost because it might just succeed in freezing the very corners of a field or garden, or touch upon only the most exposed parts of a landscape.
cosmognosis (n.) the instinctive force that tells an animal when and where to migrate [1882; < Gk. cosmos, 'the world, the universe' + gnosis, 'knowledge']
Built from a pair of Greek roots that together literally mean a 'knowledge of the world', cosmognosis was coined in the mid 1800s, at a time when many of the precise details of animal migration were still largely unknown. For centuries the annual disappearance of migratory animals had been accounted for by all manner of elaborate theories: the departure of swallows in the autumn, for instance, was variously ascribed to the birds flying far out to sea, hibernating at the bottom of ponds and even escaping to the moon to avoid the winter weather. We might know more about migration today, but quite what prompts migratory creatures to begin their journeys when the seasons change - the enigmatic instinct encapsulated in the word cosmognosis - remains something of a mystery.
See also zeitgeber, zugunruhe
cyclonopathy (n.) an abnormal sensitivity to changing weather conditions [1958; < cyclono-,cyclone, 'great storm' (< Gk.cyclos, 'wheel') + -pathy, 'feeling, disease' (< Gk.pathos, 'suffering')]
'Discomfort felt by some people [on the] approach of unpleasant weather' is how one 1950s medical dictionary defined this word, although whether cyclonopathy and the associated meteorotropism and ombrosalgia are genuine medical conditions at all is a controversial subject. There is certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest some of us are indeed laid low by seasonal changes in the atmosphere, and not just in the wintertime either. In Argentina, a dry and dusty wind known as the zonda is said to bring such terrible sleeplessness and depressiveness down the eastern slopes of the Andes that it is known locally as 'the witch's wind'. New Zealand's strong nor'wester gales have been linked to seasonal increases in everything from violent behaviour to anxiety. And so many people report feeling out of sorts when the local foehn winds blow down the northern slopes of the Swiss Alps that the widespread malaise they are said to bring with them has been known as föhnkrankheit, or 'foehn sickness', for well over a century. Even the great Joan Didion once wrote of her and her Los Angeles neighbours' seemingly preternatural ability to forecast the arrival of California's Santa Ana winds every autumn:
I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air.
Joan Didion, 'The Santa Anas', Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1969)
darkle (v.) to become gradually darker, as the days towards the end of the year [1868; apparently < earlier adv. darkling, 'in the dark' (c.15thC)]
This excellent word is an example of a back-formation - a word effectively coined in reverse. In medieval English, darkling meant hidden or concealed, or quite literally 'in the dark'. In the 1500s, however, it was...
