Earlier yesterday, we were hemmed in by a cold, dense fog. Later in the day weather conditions morphed into a storm of little ice pellets that bounced off the frozen grass like popcorn, clicking like tiny fingernails on my window glass. Fearless Editor Hank stopped by my office, and I pointed excitedly out the window.

“I know what that is!”

“What? The sleet?” he asked, peering out into the yuck outside.

“No! It’s grapple … no, wait … not that … it’s … it’s GRAUPEL!”

See? There is an exactly right word for absolutely everything. Graupel isn’t just your garden-variety sleet. It’s that fluffy, pellet-y stuff that forms when freezing fog condenses on a snowflake. The distinction between sleet and graupel, I think, is that graupel is fluffy-looking and sleet is icy. Graupel looks like a hybrid between snow and a ball-bearing.

Call me a wonk; I love these minute distinctions that make one thing not another. One of the ways I know I’m in exactly the right career is the glee I feel when I’ve discovered the precisely right word for something.

I also love that other people care enough about the physical world to create these bodies of distinctions. Somebody was really paying attention when they noticed not only that snowflakes were very different from each other, but that they fit in particular categories.

As I cruised the Internet yesterday, searching for more information on graupel (a surprising body of information can be found, as it turns out), I stumbled upon this post on Ðrawn Association describing the work of Wilson Allen Bentley, a 19-year-old farmer living in Vermont in 1885, who has now become sort of the Patron Saint of Snowflakes. Fascinated by snow crystals, this teenager was the first person to successfully produce a photo of snow or ice crystals. He magnified crystals at 69 to 3,000 times on glass plates, and ultimately verified that every ice crystal actually is unique, growing symmetrically in a 6-sided hexagon around a miniscule nucleus. The shape the snowflake ultimately takes depends on its water content and the temperature.

Those photos by Bentley completely knock me out. Photography was in its infancy when he started experimenting with photographing snowflakes. And he had to invent a new camera to be able to pursue his obsession. But just look at those photos. Simply amazing and awe-inspiring, just because a curious Vermont teenager cared enough to keep at an intellectual pursuit day after day, year after year.

After being inspired by Bentley's photos, check out www.snowcrystals.com to find more snowflake photos and physics as well as links to help you find snow activities (such as "snowflake watching") for children and adults. 

Let’s hear it for slightly fey compulsions, pretty pictures—and also graupel.

The editors of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) are nearing the end of their long road. According to the publisher (Harvard UP), this soon-to-be five volume work (the fifth volume, "S to Z" is due out next year) "captures the language spoken on America's main streets and country roads, words and phrases passed along within homes and communities, from east to west, north to south, childhood to old age." The dictionary has been in progress since 1965, and it is built on interviews recorded in 1,000 cities across the United States.

It's no secret that language fascinates me. My first article to appear in GRIT, "The Soft Drink Debate," explored just some of the regional differences that this dictionary is out to capture. 

One of the things that struck me as I read the AP story on this "Quirky Regional Dictionary" was how many of the regional words cited were rural in nature. Joan Houston Hall, who took over as editor for the dictionary when its originator Frederic Cassidy passed away, spoke of a quotation from president and Arkansan Bill Clinton that someone didn't know him "from Adam's off ox." Also mentioned were a "stone toter" (a kind of fish), and several versions of that great rural tradition a "potluck" (called a "pitch-in" in Indiana and a "scramble dinner" in northern Illinois).

Hall says that bobbasheely – a Gulf Coast word meaning "a good friend" or "to hang around with a friend" is her favorite word in the dictionary.

On the DARE website you can find a few more entries from the dictionary. Many, many children's games made that grouping. I was also excited to see some of my own dialectal/ethnic phrases – kolaches, kitty-corner, schnickelfritz – and a phrase from Caleb's most recent blog that was new to me "noodling" (catching fish with your bare hands).

You should definitely check it out. Meanwhile, I'll be over here hanging with my bobbasheelies on the punee looking for a schnibble and trying not to get honeyfuggled.

Photo by adotjdotsmith, licensed under Creative Commons.