I Go Pogo
I looked out the window this morning and the city was shrouded in a blue-grey haze. Fog is nothing unusual, certainly not in Atlantic Canada, but you don't expect to see it in mid-winter, and you don't usually see it so pale and uniform. "Fog?" I asked Jim, baffled. "Ice fog," he replied.
I've lived in this region for my entire life and somehow I had managed never to experience or even hear of ice fog. And yet there it was, out the window, looking for all the world as if we had been embedded in aerogel.
I'm still not clear how ice fog can even exist: how can ice crystals remain suspended in mid-air? Why don't they fall to the ground, as snow would? Whatever keeps them up there, that's where they were this morning. (Answers.com says that the condition "requires temperatures well below the freezing point", and it was -13 C this morning, so I guess that qualifies.)
The American word for this phenomenon is the rather amusing "pogonip". It appears to be the only English-language word adopted from the Shoshone language--or, rather, freely adapted, since their word for it is more like "pakenappeh".
+
I don't know if this is bragging or what, but let's pretend it's just a peek into the way my brain works. This evening, Jim was using his computer while I was preparing dinner, and I looked over his shoulder from across the room and saw what was clearly a subway-map schematic topped with the words "Hiker Detector". I went back into the kitchen, mulling over those words, and then a few seconds later, boom! I darted back into the computer room and said, "That's a subway map of Toronto with everything anagrammed, right?" Jim confirmed that it was.
And how did I know this? Because "Hiker Detector" is an anagram of "Ride the Rocket", which is the Toronto Transit Commission's double-entendre slogan, and because a couple of days before, BoingBoing had posted a link to a similar map of London. I don't necessarily love anagrams of this sort, as most of them are laboured, but I do love mashing words around in my head and turning them into other words, and I have to admit that these maps are addictively clever.
I've lived in this region for my entire life and somehow I had managed never to experience or even hear of ice fog. And yet there it was, out the window, looking for all the world as if we had been embedded in aerogel.
I'm still not clear how ice fog can even exist: how can ice crystals remain suspended in mid-air? Why don't they fall to the ground, as snow would? Whatever keeps them up there, that's where they were this morning. (Answers.com says that the condition "requires temperatures well below the freezing point", and it was -13 C this morning, so I guess that qualifies.)
The American word for this phenomenon is the rather amusing "pogonip". It appears to be the only English-language word adopted from the Shoshone language--or, rather, freely adapted, since their word for it is more like "pakenappeh".
+
I don't know if this is bragging or what, but let's pretend it's just a peek into the way my brain works. This evening, Jim was using his computer while I was preparing dinner, and I looked over his shoulder from across the room and saw what was clearly a subway-map schematic topped with the words "Hiker Detector". I went back into the kitchen, mulling over those words, and then a few seconds later, boom! I darted back into the computer room and said, "That's a subway map of Toronto with everything anagrammed, right?" Jim confirmed that it was.
And how did I know this? Because "Hiker Detector" is an anagram of "Ride the Rocket", which is the Toronto Transit Commission's double-entendre slogan, and because a couple of days before, BoingBoing had posted a link to a similar map of London. I don't necessarily love anagrams of this sort, as most of them are laboured, but I do love mashing words around in my head and turning them into other words, and I have to admit that these maps are addictively clever.
posted by pyramus | 7:34 PM
2 Comments:
You see, for all my word nerdery, my mind just doesn't work like that. Anagrams are totally beyond me.
You and Jim both. He's smart as hell, but after I told him about the anagram, he said (and he may have been exaggerating a little), "I've been sitting here for ten minutes trying to figure out what that stood for."
Upon reflection I decided that my rapid anagramming was helped along by another visual clue: the typeface. I haven't been to Toronto in a couple of years, but the general layout of the subway map, along with the typefaces, is very distinctive, and I'm sure that was a help. So I'm not really as smart as all that.
Post a Comment
<< Home