Today is Ascension Thursday, a festival traditionally marked all over Europe by customs involving water. In Sweden, for example, a person who fishes from dawn to dusk today is supposed to learn the time when fish bite best, information that will hold good for the rest of the year. In Armenia, young women are thought to be able to divine their fortunes on this date, using tokens in a bowl of water drawn from seven springs, writes Frank McNally.
Perhaps the most famous Ascension Day custom, now defunct, was the annual ceremony in which the Doge of Venice "married" his city to the sea by throwing a wedding ring into the water. Sadly, that romance has soured in recent times. Like a wife who has taken to the drink, the Venetian lagoon has been something to hide from visitors lately, while the city tries to rescue their relationship with flood control mechanisms. There was even talk of a barring order. Not that anyone blames the sea - she's had a lot to put up with, God knows. But I visited Venice myself last month and the situation was still tense. We're all just hoping they'll be able to patch things up soon.
According to Met Éireann, Ireland can expect several events today involving water. And since it's another tradition that rain falling on Ascension Thursday has healing properties, this could be good news, especially for the south and west. Indeed, healing opportunities should spread northwards to affect all areas during the day, with heavy outbreaks in places tonight. Normal, secular rain resumes tomorrow, when Ireland should still be on course for the wettest May on record.
If I can digress here for a moment, it used to be a truism that Eskimos had an unusually high number of words for snow. You still hear arguments to this effect. Fortescue's West Greenlandic Grammar - a very influential work in the field and probably my favourite study of Greenlandic grammar generally - lists 49 words for snow or ice: differentiating between "falling snow", "snow blown in [ doorways]", "feathery clumps of snow", and so on. I was therefore disconcerted to read an article on Wikipedia recently arguing that the supposed multitude of Eskimo snow words is a "popular urban myth".
Leaving aside the issue of how an urban myth could arise in Greenland, in advance of anything else urban, the article is annoyingly persuasive. It traces the origins of the "myth" to 1911, when anthropologist Franz Boas claimed that Eskimos had four words for snow. In 1940, another expert pitched it at seven. Thereafter journalists caught hold of the concept and inflation set in, reaching its height on February 9th, 1984 - "White Thursday" - when a New York Times editorial put the number at 100.
The Wikipedia article makes the obvious point that there is no one "Eskimo" language. It also argues that the various Inuit languages allow for combinations of words that may appear like single terms but are more equivalent to English sentences. And it suggests that insofar as the Inuit might have a few extra descriptions for snow, it's not that they see "wind-blown snow" or "snow on the boughs of trees" as completely different concepts - the popular notion; it's just that they have more snow to describe.
I mention all this because of my belief that the Irish language should have at least 49 different words for rain, accumulated from centuries of sodden experience. Instead I find that De Bhaldraithe's English-Irish dictionary has barely a handful.
"Pelting rain" and "light rain" are covered, to be sure. But on the vast spectrum of precipitation that lies between these terms, there is silence. This is in keeping with the state of permanent denial, vis-à-vis the climate, in which Irish people live: the same denial that causes us to abandon umbrellas and take to wearing T-shirts and drinking beer in the street every time there's a break in the clouds.
If the Irish language was a reflection of meteorological reality, it would have separate terms for all of the following: light rain, heavy rain, in-between rain that forces you to use your wipers but is not sufficient to stop them squeaking on the windscreen, sudden rain, where-the-hell-did-that-come-from-rain, torrential rain, rain of biblical proportions, threatened (or at least rumoured) rain, healing rain, wind-blown rain, rain that falls sideways and wets your trousers no matter which direction you point the umbrella, feathery clumps of rain, rain that got into the seams of your apparently dry bicycle saddle and only came out again when you sat on it, rain on your parade, acid rain, monsoon-like rain, rain falling in a distant forest, rain that ruins the chances of the top-of-the-ground horse you backed two months ago at 66-1, rain on a tin roof, rain meant for the guy beside you at a football match but deflected on to you by his golf umbrella, rain that meets you at the airport to welcome you back to Ireland, rain like stair-rods, fine misty rain barely distinguishable from fog, rain that causes national embarrassment by falling non-stop during the Ryder Cup; etc, etc.