You can guarantee if there is frost on the the windscreen it's cold outside. Photo/ File
You can guarantee if there is frost on the the windscreen it's cold outside. Photo/ File
Just last week I read on MetService that my local area would be "warm". The quoted maximum temperature was 19C.
I'm sorry but 19C is not warm. At best it is mild.
One summer when in Wellington – it must have been January 23 which, from memory, is Wellington's summer– I happened upon someone in a supermarket queue. He turned to me and said, "Isn't it hot today."
So confused was I that I made a point of watching the TV weather that night and Wellington's maximum was 19C. So now, 19C could not only be warm, it could even be hot.
The first example you might get away with if you added, "for the time of year" but I would still disagree. Warm is warm no matter what time of the year it might be and, to my mind, it would certainly need a 2 as the leading figure.
As for the second example – remember the actual maximum was 19C – the leading figure would probably need to be a 3.
Confusion definitely appears to be rife in the matter of temperature-related adjectives.
And there is another issue which compounds the problem. Once around springtime I saw a letter or text to a local newspaper which went something like this: "Why spend money on going to Fiji? Our temperature yesterday was 24C. The maximum in Suva was 23C."
That person was missing one very important factor. He/she was only thinking about the maximum. Our minimum might have been 9C, Suva's might have been 21C. The difference is the diurnal range and that difference is a biggie.
On more than one occasion in Suva I have wondered whether I was still wet from the shower or already perspiring. The answer was invariably the latter and I felt I could muster up just enough energy for little more than some moderate blinking.
Sorry that I cannot remember the exact figures but, last week, Christchurch made the news for going from something like zero to 20C in a day. You can't compare that with Suva. A Fijian tourist arriving in Christchurch might freeze to death at night.
Wyn Drabble
Another key difference between New Zealand and so many other temperate or cool places is that we grit our teeth and bear the cold. Only now are we beginning to insulate our homes and escape from the culture that turns on a one-bar heater in the morning, off when we leave for work and back on after arrival home from work. Crazy.
When I was growing up in the South Island, the only things between my bed and a severe frost were a single layer of weatherboards, wallpaper and a layer of scrawny scrim. I can affirm from experience that scrim does not provide effective insulation.
After we had breakfast, I think we put on our jandals and biked to school through blizzards. No, wait a minute, that can't be right. I don't think I was allowed jandals.
We knew our weather and we knew it practically. We knew what a stiff nor' wester was because we had to bike into one.
It mattered not that our science teacher told us, "Condensation is occurring upon condensation nuclei as the parcel lifts, cools adiabatically and becomes saturated." We could just look skywards and see that a cloud was forming.
So, it's quite clear that there's a lot of variation in weather talk and some of it is unnecessarily silly. I think Jim Hickey had the right formula.
The best bet if you want to know what the weather's like is simply to look out the window. If the windows are too iced over to see through, it's probably not warm.
Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, a writer, musician and public speaker
