DB

I have to look up the number but I believe there are 20 names for snow.

It’s not in my language, I believe it is in the Eskimo language. Knowing that a lot of their life is surrounded and defined by it, it would make sense that they have so many ways to describe snow. But, that does not hold true for us; we don’t lean on precise language, rather we use descriptive language…poetic language. We say how two things are and are not, and we say things that would normally make no sense unless you performed a good amount of mental gymnastics that it feels like art.

So, rain. The rain in the Pacific Northwest is not like the rain that we know in Hawaii. If the forecast in the PNW says that it will rain, the clouds will not light up with a tropical sun that hides behind it. Perhaps it’ll be a drizzle or an actual rain. People don’t carry umbrellas and most of them just wear jackets with hoodies. It’s just a little damp and a little cold. That being said, I did come to the Pacific Northwest in the summer, so I don’t think it’s as cold as it could be.

Anyway, I was wondering why we didn’t have more descriptors for rain. We have drizzle, we have shower, and I think that’s about it. I think we can describe rain as light, as a mist, as heavy… But I don’t think I have anything that really describes the pervasive rain that is…the manifestation of depression.

I can see why seasonal depression is a thing. Not just from a medical standpoint. It persists in the clouds that hang high in the sky, erasing the memory of blue. And although not all days are terrible, heavy days, most days are cloudy. This tips a person’s mood into the side of not having a good day. And because it is such a subtle sadness, it can drift along unnoticed. That’s sort of what mine is like right now. The Pacific Northwest has reminded me of it…my subtle sadness resurfaces here.

The fact that there are no other names for rain is another depressing thing. Because in the cold of snow, you can decide to do nothing and die or to struggle and live. I think it’s because it is so extreme weather that your survival instinct forces you to be creative. If it’s just cloudy, it does not threaten you directly. That is the danger of depression and the cloudy sky.

They are just nonthreatening enough that we do not know to fear them.

Postscript

I have since looked up the names for snow. I am not doing a lot of deep digging, because I am not an anthropologist, linguist, and I am not interested in the exact number of things for this factoid. There are about 40 terms in Central Siberian Yupik for snow, while the Inuit in Canada’s Nunavik region has 53 names for snow, according to the Washington Post.