Snow terms
- Author: Graham
- Filed under: Language
Feb 14,2009
England has had far more snow this winter than for many a long year – 18 according to the Meteorological Office.
When snow falls and does not immediately melt, what is it doing? In Scotland, it is said to be lying. In many parts of England it settles, but in the North West of England – and maybe elsewhere – it sticks. And in Wiltshire at least, it pitches. At first sight, this last seems the oddest, but we pitch a tent when we set it up, so this is a similar use of the word.
When we think of dialectal variation, we usually think of the unusual words that occur in one area but not others. Most speakers of English would not consider their use of ‘lie’, ’settle’, ’stick’ or ‘pitch’ in this sense as dialectal, but it is just as much part of local dialect as is Glaswegian ‘yin’ for ‘one’, or North Staffordshire ‘purvet’ for ‘rummage’.
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3 Responses for "Snow terms"
I think that’s a malo-citrine comparison. All of “lie”, “stick”, and “settle” as applied to snow are part of the standard dialect: “pitch” (in this sense) and “purvet” are traditional dialect forms, as is “yin” for “one”. The standard dialect can be spoken with any of numerous accents and contains much vocabulary that is mostly used locally, like “davenport” = “sofa”.
In New York, it sticks. It has never occurred to me before that it might do something else elsewhere. Thanks for bringing this to our attention!
Amy’s comment (”[snow] sticks; it has never occurred to me that it might do something else”) provides a fascinating insight into the way that each us tends to regard our local dialect as “normal” and everything else as slightly perverse. Graham’s mention of snow terms brought to mind another verb which varies significantly as one goes north (in the U.K.) : in the south, one “picks things up” (from a shop, or from a surface) — the following text, copied verbatim from Dales Cycles web site, makes it plain that in Scotland one does something quite different …
“Regretfully, items purchased on-line cannot be uplifted from our Glasgow shop.”
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