The Wind Cries ... Oe?
By MARK VANHOENACKER, NYT
When I studied to become a pilot, I learned the names of the winds. It’s hard to not be charmed by their poetry — the Sahara’s Harmattan, France’s Mistral, and the Oe, that consonant-denuded Faroe Islands whirlwind.
But this Aeolian aristocracy raises as many questions as it does Scrabble scores. Why are some winds named? And are Americans ready to rediscover their own terroir of tempests?
Named breezes, says Vladimir Jankovic, a scientist at the University of Manchester in England, usually have distinct personalities — a recognizable cocktail of strength, season, direction, temperature, duration or precipitation. A name, then, is a forecast. But winds carry the force of history and myth as much as weather.
It was Hippocrates, after all, who said a physician should know which breezes cause flabbiness and which induce humid heads. A 19th-century description of London’s northeasterly winter blasts, Dr. Jankovic notes, warned of a catalog of side effects befitting a 21st-century pharmaceutical ad — among them “a sense of impending suffocation” and “restless sleep wetted by uncontrollable salivating.” No wonder many Britons vacation in South Africa, where the Cape Doctor is famed (and named) for its healthful influences.
(More here.)
When I studied to become a pilot, I learned the names of the winds. It’s hard to not be charmed by their poetry — the Sahara’s Harmattan, France’s Mistral, and the Oe, that consonant-denuded Faroe Islands whirlwind.
But this Aeolian aristocracy raises as many questions as it does Scrabble scores. Why are some winds named? And are Americans ready to rediscover their own terroir of tempests?
Named breezes, says Vladimir Jankovic, a scientist at the University of Manchester in England, usually have distinct personalities — a recognizable cocktail of strength, season, direction, temperature, duration or precipitation. A name, then, is a forecast. But winds carry the force of history and myth as much as weather.
It was Hippocrates, after all, who said a physician should know which breezes cause flabbiness and which induce humid heads. A 19th-century description of London’s northeasterly winter blasts, Dr. Jankovic notes, warned of a catalog of side effects befitting a 21st-century pharmaceutical ad — among them “a sense of impending suffocation” and “restless sleep wetted by uncontrollable salivating.” No wonder many Britons vacation in South Africa, where the Cape Doctor is famed (and named) for its healthful influences.
(More here.)
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