Weather Words – Nimbus
Hello,
It’s that time of year again. Pumpkin spice may be back on your local menu, if you’re in the northern hemisphere you’ll be kicking through leaf piles, students are returning to education (my eldest started at university today), but for me it also heralds preparation for National Novel Writing Month in November.
If you’ve been thinking about taking part, don’t panic. I start early because I’m a mentor for the Ireland North East region. This means I need to order bits and bobs from the USA, which take ages to arrive, plus I feel obliged to declare my own writing project early (yes, the mentors, called municipal liaisons, write their own novels while cheer-leading their writers and running forums and meetings). This year’s project will be my fifth etymology book – “Words the Weather Gave Us” (the first draft). I decided that as everybody loves to discuss the weather I might as well provide some fun words to use in the conversation. I hope you approve.
Regular readers will be counting on their fingers right now and saying – “fifth?”. Yes, there is a fourth book – “Words Christmas Gave Us” but thanks to a variety of factors (family illness, elderly parent, and timing issues on cover design) I found it impossible to launch it in time for Christmas 2022. As it’s a bad idea to launch a Christmas book in April that one is going to be on hold for about a year, unfortunately. But trust me, it will be worth the wait. I honestly think it may be the best Wordfoolery book yet as the stories I found during my research were brilliant. Don’t fret, I’ll let you all know when it’s getting close to release. I’m toying with the idea of a small digital download or ebook to tide over readers during my book drought, but I’m still fine-tuning my ideas on that one.
Anyhow, back to weather and weather words. I’ll be covering any I can find (please feel free to suggest some in the comments – any I use will earn you a spot in the book acknowledgements) plus plenty of weather myths, superstitions, and phrases – yes I’ll try to get to the bottom of “raining cats and dogs”.
Hence this week’s word is a weather word – nimbus. A nimbus is either a large grey cloud (the heavy puffy ones which often precede rain) or a luminous cloud or halo surrounding a supernatural being or saint. You can see plenty of the clouds in my photo of the Dunbrody famine ship below (famine ships took Irish people desperate to leave the Great Famine of 1845-1852 to places like America – the Irish population dropped by 25% during those years).
Nimbus clouds, Captain!Nimbus joined English in the early 1600s directly from the same word in Latin (cloud) which may have been related to nebula (cloud or mist) from a probable root word nebh (cloud). The root word yielded words in many languages relating to heaven (or the Norse versions), clouds, and fog.
By the 1700s, you’d find nimbus being used in the world of art to describe the halo, often painted in gilt, to indicate the sainthood of the person depicted.
According the Century Dictionary the shape of the nimbus was significant. God the father had a triangular nimbus (possible connection to the idea of the Holy Trinity there, I would guess), Christ had a cross-shaped one for obvious reasons, Mary had a plain circle, while angels and saints often had a circle of rays. Finally if you were painted with a square nimbus this indicated you were alive when the artist was at work. I’ve visited many galleries and churches in my time and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that last one but now I will have my eyes peeled for it.
Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Grace (@Wordfoolery)
p.s. Don’t forget if you have favourite weather words, phrases, terms, or superstitions – please drop them in the comments!
