Word of the Moment: Blizzard

As I sit here in my apartment, Cincinnati is digging itself out from what the meterologists are calling a thirty six hour “snow event.” Which sounds a bit euphemistic, if you ask me. Of course, we have nothing to complain about, as the bulk of the snow has fallen on the mid-Atlantic region, leading me to wonder if Washington DC may want to think about hosting the Winter Olympics.  

Among the more evocative names for this snow event, such as "Sno-mageddon" and the "sno-pocolypse," it's easy to overlook a word as mundane as "blizzard," but this now-humble term also entered our vernacular during a snow storm of biblical proportions. 

With hopes that everyone is someplace warm and safe, let's take a minute to investigate the cloudy origins of the word “blizzard,” recall the historic winter that popularized the term and consider the way words sometimes pile up on top each other like snowdrifts in the wind.

While the precise origin of the word “blizzard” is unknown, the word itself appears to be as American as ice burying the Great Plains.  Both the Online Etymological Dictionary and the Oxford English dictionary record an earlier meaning for the word of a violent strike or blow as in a punch from the first half of the nineteenth century. The word was certainly part of the slang of the American West, although when precisely it became associate with a violent snow storm will probably never be known.

The word became popular in print during the long, harsh winter of 1880 and 1881. An article in the Milwaukee Journal on October 15, 1922 (available online) recalled the week forty two years prior that the first of many severe snow storms lashed the upper Midwest:

The snow fell to a depth of only several inches, but the wind drove into high drifts and packed it into the railway cuts so hard that railway traffic was brought to a standstill all over the state. Rescue parties went out in sleighs carrying food to the stalled passenger trains. Windows in hundreds of homes in many cities and towns in the storm area were broken, adding to the discomfort. In Milwaukee the Garfield presidential campaign was on, and the Garfield wigwam was blown down and lumber piles were leveled.

The wintery weather continued to assault the plains, often snowing for days at a time with only a few days respite between storms. Homesteaders such as the Wilder family (of Little House on the Prairie fame) found themselves completely cut off from the outside world. Laura Ingels Wilder would later write her 1940 novel The Long Winter based upon childhood experiences during the '80-'81 blizzards and her account is considered to be more or less historically accurate. A longer newspaper account in the Waukesha Freeman is available online, although it may be little comfort for those of us who have yet to dig out our cars.

Temperatures that winter plunged, and the weather records for Yankton in the Dakota territories recorded a monthly high of only 36 degrees Fahrenheit in January 1881, with a low of negative 32. The freezing temperatures and powerful winds caused snow drifts to accumulate ten to twenty feet deep in parts of Wisconsin's North Woods.

Which brings us to a linguistic phenomenon that I like to call “Semantic Snow Drifts.” Generally speaking, the meaning of a word has nothing whatsoever to do with its sound. We do not, for example, reserve the vowel /a/ for nouns that are green or animals with four legs or anything like that. There are, however, some interesting clusters of words in English that suggest a relationship between sound and meaning exists at least in general usage.

Consider “blizzard,” a violent snowstorm characterized by high winds and low visibility. Other words with that B + L cluster at the beginning also have to do a lack of color or light: blind, bleach, black, blemish, bleak and blank. If we consider the word's original meaning of a violent strike we can find even more “BL” words: blow, blast, blaze, bluster, and blitz (which, coming from the German word for “lightning,” manages to convey both meanings).

Many, if not most, of these words have been linked to two Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots both represented as *bhel- which means to shine or burn and blow or swell. These roots may also have given us such words as bloat, bloom, blossom and balloon. Not to mention (through our borrowings from non-Germanic cousin languages): flame, phlegm and phallus.

It is important to remember, as we pointed out for "fox," that Proto-Indo-Eurpean is a reconstructed language, created through rigorous comparison of languages spoken today. The definition of PIE roots have to be very general in order to have enough room for the meanings of all the words that went into discovering the root in the first place (blind, blaze, flame, phlegm, etc...). As a result, there is a tendency for PIE roots become sort of like Olympian gods: hyper-fertile words begetting offspring like Zeus at a singles bar.

The human mind is the greatest pattern creation machine the earth has ever seen. So, it sounds reasonable that synonyms should sound alike, even if there is no linguistic reason (historical or phonological) why they would. The presence of a cluster of “BL-” words with similar meanings may have influenced the popularity of later word borrowings (“blitz,” e.g.) and word creations (“blizzard,” e.g.). Over time, these clusters could accumulate like a small pile of snow gains mass as the winds pile more and more flakes on top of it.

Well, the white death has finally stopped falling here and I have been out of food and gin for nearly two days, so I must be off to the grocery store.  As soon as I can find some dogs to tie to this sled....

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Research for this article came from the OED and the Online etymological dictionary as well as Prologue magazine (published by the National Archives) and the Wisconsin Historical Society who run an absolutely kick-ass website and electronic archive.  No animals were harmed during the writing of this blog, but a few brain cells were irreparably damaged.