`All over the windy world," writes Brian Wilson, "particularly in coastal and desert regions, rather than simply referring to them by the points of the compass, people have given beautiful, expressive, even poetic names to their winds."
And, of course, you have heard it all before in "Weather Eye". But Brian's little book, called Dances with Waves: Around Ireland by Kayak, provides a litany much more exotic and exhaustive than any you may have read upon these pages. Where he got them from, I do not know, but let me offer you an apercu.
The Japanese apparently have enbata, the sea breeze, hagochuria, a warm southerly, iphara, the cold northerly, and idaki-haizea, the wind of the sun.
The Norse sagas, he goes on to tell us, talk of the wind's gnyr; while the pittarak still roars down from the Greenland ice fields and the purgas, crivetz and vingas winds, as he nicely puts it, "ensure that Siberia never gets too warm".
Many of the usual suspects get a mention, like the mistral, the harsh cold, cutting, ravine wind that surges down the Rhone valley in winter, and the soft, gentle, westerly zephyr of the Mediterranean. Most of us, too, are familiar with the sirocco, the hot dry wind that sweeps northwards from the Sahara and Arabian deserts. But who ever heard of the virazon of the Atacama desert, the imbat of Tunisia, or laawan, "the helper", who renders unspecified assistance to the inhabitants of the Moroccan Atlas Mountains?
And surely the prize for the most quaintly named of all these local winds must go to mezzerifoullousen, which one can quite believe, as is alleged, to mean "the wind that plucks the fowls".
Brian Wilson has a theory as to why so many cultures named their winds. "Naming is, after all, a form of power. Fear of the unknown, or unnamed, is always worse than facing that which has a name and can, by virtue of that name, be cursed or blessed, banished or summoned. Unnamed is unclaimed is untamed. Perhaps the Irish winds are so much harder to bear simply because they are nebulous and unidentified."
But what I liked best from this medley of meteorological taxonomy was an explanation for the words of a haunting 1950s Lerner and Loewe melody, sung as I recall by Frankie Laine: "Even the lonely prospectors of the Californian gold-rush had a name for the wind. Thinking of her as a cold, fickle woman, haunting their dreams and never letting them forget her, they called the wind Maria."
Now, not a lot of people know that. I certainly didn't.