A Winter Dictionary E-Book

Paul Anthony Jones

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 251

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

As the nights draw in and the cold descends, the winter world emerges – and with it an incredible array of words that superbly capture the season. From frost-dogs (tiny frozen particles of falling snow) and Stepmother's breath (a sudden cold snap) to hibernaculum (a winter refuge during the winter months) and crapulent (feeling the aftereffects of overindulgence), Paul Anthony Jones delves into the origins of these rare, fascinating and forgotten words, opening up a whole new way of describing the winter months. Whether you're keeping cosy in front of the fire, warding off the winter blues or throwing yourself into the party season, A Winter Dictionary is the perfect way to while away the snow-laden days. Praise for Why Is this a Question? 'An enlightening, delightful book that will make you question every sentence you've ever read or written.' Arthur der Weduwen, author of The Library 'As entertaining as it is engrossing . . . this book will delight logophiles everywhere, and create many new ones.' John Banville 'Every page will make you stop, think and wonder.' James Hawes, author of The Shortest History of England

Leseprobe

In memory of my Uncle Peter

CONTENTS

Introduction

Abbreviations and Symbols Used in this Book

1. The Changing Seasons

2. Winter Storms

3. Ice and Snow

4. Keeping Cosy

5. Out in the Elements

6. The Winter Blues

7. The Party Season

8. Preparing for the Holidays

9. Christmas Day

10. The New Year

11. Snowmelt

Acknowledgements

Word Finder

INTRODUCTION

There comes a moment each year – first thing in the morning, usually sometime in the middle of autumn – when you step outside and notice everything is suddenly and unexpectedly crisp. The sky is not quite as bright as it has been in recent days. A thin layer of dew has accumulated on every surface. There might be the slightest hint of a hazy bluish mist hanging in the air. The grass and the ground are speckled with ice and, as you walk, the brown and orange leaves under your feet crunch with the first frost of the season.

It’s a familiar scene, and an equally familiar feeling – so much so, in fact, that over the passing centuries countless ingenious people have come up with words for these most recognisable moments of the oncoming winter. That hazy autumn mist, for instance, is a blewse. A dew-covered surface can be said to be rorulent, or hammelled if the moisture has begun to freeze. An early autumn frost is a sniveler, while frosty ground that crunches and crackles as you walk on it is chibbly. And the gradual diminishing of the daylight hours as the year nears its end can be known as darkling.

As autumn continues to give way to winter, a host of other cold-weather words come into play, such as a frost-hag (a freezing mist), queeving (the bending of treetops in the wind) and foxing days (on which the weather turns out better than it had promised earlier). When the temperatures drop and the ice and snow set in, you might find yourself snerdling (snuggling together for warmth), peeling (accidentally stepping out in insufficient clothing) or even barflogging (slapping your arms against your sides for warmth). Next comes the holiday season, when houses are bouned (decorated in evergreens), we all fall guilty of abligurition (profligate spending on food and drink) and at long last we can powl (leave work early to go to the pub) and enjoy a kirsmas-glass (a yuletide toast). And as the festivities wind down and the barrel-sickness (drunken overindulgence) starts to subside, the new year comes and goes and the world outside changes once again. Nature begins to whicken (awaken from the depths of winter), birds valentine (chirrup romantically) and, as the springtime approaches at last, you might experience your first greenout of the new year (the heart-lifting moment when you spy the first fresh green growth poking out above the wintry ground).

It is unusual and long-forgotten words just like these – over 400 of them, in fact – that have been collected here in A Winter Dictionary. Together these words cover more than one thousand years of the English language, from the very earliest Old English texts to contemporary coinages and modern slangy inventions, providing us with a robust (if largely overlooked) wintertime vocabulary. Practically all corners of the English-speaking world are namechecked along the way here, from Britain’s patchwork of regional dialects to American and Canadian English, and even the only recently described jargon of polar researchers in Antarctica. A handful of notable words from languages outside of England have made these pages too – as well as several from the endlessly inventive and evocative language of Scots.

Some of these words are considered rather formal and literary, others scholarly and scientific, and many are squarely limited to regional dialects or local idiom, and have scarcely ever been heard or used outside of their home turf. Despite their relative obscurity, however, they have all been dutifully recorded and defined in the dictionaries and glossaries of the past by authors who noted their worth and sought to record their meaning and use for posterity as a result. These words might never have gained quite the level of use required to graduate onto the pages of the household dictionary on your bookshelf, of course, but that is not to say that they did not once (or, in many instances, still do) have sufficient circulation to warrant our attention.

Although this is first and foremost a dictionary, the words here have been organised into thematic chapters taking us right through the winter season – starting with those relating to the change from autumn into winter, and ending with the opposite change from winter into spring. The entries within each chapter are then listed alphabetically and dealt with as they would be in a standard dictionary, with a short definition followed by some explanatory notes on their history, origins, background and use. Any words in bold type can be cross-referenced and found elsewhere in this book; outside of each chapter, head to the Word Finder at the back to find your way around.

The date given in each entry represents the earliest independent written record of the word in question, used in the context given in the definition, that I have been able to track down. Unfortunately these dates are often very difficult to ascertain reliably (especially with dialect terms and inventions that may well have been in spoken use locally for centuries before finding their way into print). As a result, in many instances they should be taken only as an estimate, providing a rough guide to a word’s age or to the era in which it first emerged. (If you have earlier evidence of a word than I have been able to track down here, of course, I’d be delighted to hear about it!)

Paul Anthony Jones

ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS USED IN THIS BOOK

?

denotes an approximate date or period, or an unclear or suggested etymology

<

derived from, descended from

adj.

adjective

adv.

adverb

app.

apparently

dial.

dialect

Dut.

Dutch

excl.

exclamation

Fr.

French

Ger.

German

Gk.

Greek

Icel.

Icelandic

Ir.

Irish

It.

Italian

Jap.

Japanese

Lat.

Latin

lit.

literally

ME

Middle English

n.

noun

naut.

nautical

Nor.

Norwegian

nr.

near

OE

Old English

ON

Old Norse

orig.

originally

phr.

phrase

pl.

plural

rel.

related to

Sc.

Scots

Scan.

Scandinavian

sl.

slang

Sp.

Spanish

Sw.

Swedish

v.

verb

1. THE CHANGING SEASONS

In the northern hemisphere at least, winter begins at the winter solstice when the Earth reaches its maximum tilt on its axis and so slants our part of the world to its furthest point away from the sun. We experience this as the shortest day of the year – around 21 or 22 December – after which the three long months of winter officially commence.

On a more personal scale, we will have felt the oncoming winter for a fair few weeks before this. The leaves on the trees change colour and then fall. Birds that only spend the summer with us prepare to migrate, and then depart. The winds pick up, the rain starts to fall, and day by day the temperatures cool and the turbulent skies darken. The very first wintry nip in the air is usually felt when the calendar tells us it is still autumn.

This period of change and seasonal upheaval is the subject of this first set of wintertime words, from the increasingly stormy weather to the jittery behaviour of our migratory wildlife.

abscission (n.) the process by which a leaf detaches from its tree in autumn [1887; < Lat. abscindere, ‘to cut off, to separate’]

In general terms abscission is just the act of detaching or cutting something away, and in the five centuries or so that the word has been in use it has been applied to everything from surgical procedures to religious excommunication. In botanical terms, though, abscission is the natural shedding of a part of a plant or tree – like a ripened fruit, a flower lost after pollination or a withered autumn leaf. The precise point at which a leaf breaks away from its tree is called the abscission zone.

See alsomarcescent

afterlight (n.) the glow that remains in the sky after the sun has set [1683]

As the sun’s rays begin to fade a little earlier each day in the autumn, you might find yourself still busy out of doors or on your way home with only their afterlight in the sky.

The evening of the year!. . . The hours wane quickly into shadow, and a chilliness as of the night wind is upon the earth. Sometimes a summer day peeps in here and there like the after-light of the sun, but its aspect is out of season, and it greets us with a melancholy beauty.

E. H. Chapin, ‘Seasons of Meditation’, The Rose of Charon (1850)

akering-time (n.) the autumn; in particular, the period in late autumn when oak trees start to drop their acorns [dial., 1883; < aker, ‘acorn’]

The ‘akering’ here is just a dialect alteration of acorning, the collecting or gathering of acorns, which have long been used as meal to fatten pigs ahead of the winter. Likewise, akermast is the collective name for all the fallen fruit of an oak tree lying on the forest floor.

backendish (adj.) of the weather, rough and stormy [dial., 1898; < back end, ‘the rearmost part’ + –ish]

A word used to describe weather that seems quite literally appropriate for the ‘back end’ of the year – so something well worth remembering in the ever wetter and windier final weeks of autumn. Or, in Britain at least, much of the rest of the year.

big eye (n.) sleeplessness or insomnia, caused or worsened by changes in the length of the day [1958; ? < the wide open eyes of a sleepless person]

This twentieth-century coinage was invented by insomniac polar scientists struggling to deal with the extreme and prolonged changes of night and day in Antarctica. The seasonal change might not be quite so severe in our part of the world, but it can still be discombobulating to find the sky completely dark at four o’clock in the afternoon (and still just as dark at eight o’clock the following morning).

blewse (n.) a bluish morning’s mist [dial., 1887; < ‘blues’]

Seemingly nothing more than a dialect adjustment of ‘blues’, blewse mists are apparently common in the late summer and early autumn when, as a sign of things to come, the temperature suddenly drops overnight following a cloudlessly sunny day.

Blewse. . . A bluish mist, not unusual in summer when the temperature suddenly becomes chilled, the sky remaining cloudless. It is supposed to bring a blight.

F. B. Zincke, Some Materials for the History of Wherstead (1887)

chirming (n., v.) the subdued twittering of birds before a storm [dial., 1846; < OE cirm]

The intermingled sound of different birds’ songs has been known as chirming since Old English times, but by the nineteenth century the more specific and more evocative meaning above had emerged in a handful of English dialects. ‘The melancholy under-tone of a bird previous to a storm’ is how one Victorian dictionary defined a chirm, making this the perfect word for the restless and eerily restrained chirruping of birds as they are forced to take shelter during the squally autumn months.

corner-frost (n.) a very faint or early frost, occurring outside of or long before the wintertime [1898]

An unseasonably early or only very slight frost can be known as a corner-frost because it might just succeed in freezing the very corners of a field or garden, or touch upon only the most exposed parts of a landscape.

cosmognosis (n.) the instinctive force that tells an animal when and where to migrate [1882; < Gk. cosmos, ‘the world, the universe’ + gnosis, ‘knowledge’]

Built from a pair of Greek roots that together literally mean a ‘knowledge of the world’, cosmognosis was coined in the mid 1800s, at a time when many of the precise details of animal migration were still largely unknown. For centuries the annual disappearance of migratory animals had been accounted for by all manner of elaborate theories: the departure of swallows in the autumn, for instance, was variously ascribed to the birds flying far out to sea, hibernating at the bottom of ponds and even escaping to the moon to avoid the winter weather. We might know more about migration today, but quite what prompts migratory creatures to begin their journeys when the seasons change – the enigmatic instinct encapsulated in the word cosmognosis – remains something of a mystery.

See alsozeitgeber, zugunruhe

cyclonopathy (n.) an abnormal sensitivity to changing weather conditions [1958; < cyclono–,cyclone, ‘great storm’ (< Gk.cyclos, ‘wheel’) + –pathy, ‘feeling, disease’ (< Gk.pathos, ‘suffering’)]

‘Discomfort felt by some people [on the] approach of unpleasant weather’ is how one 1950s medical dictionary defined this word, although whether cyclonopathy and the associated meteorotropism and ombrosalgia are genuine medical conditions at all is a controversial subject. There is certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest some of us are indeed laid low by seasonal changes in the atmosphere, and not just in the wintertime either. In Argentina, a dry and dusty wind known as the zonda is said to bring such terrible sleeplessness and depressiveness down the eastern slopes of the Andes that it is known locally as ‘the witch’s wind’. New Zealand’s strong nor’wester gales have been linked to seasonal increases in everything from violent behaviour to anxiety. And so many people report feeling out of sorts when the local foehn winds blow down the northern slopes of the Swiss Alps that the widespread malaise they are said to bring with them has been known as föhnkrankheit, or ‘foehn sickness’, for well over a century. Even the great Joan Didion once wrote of her and her Los Angeles neighbours’ seemingly preternatural ability to forecast the arrival of California’s Santa Ana winds every autumn:

I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air.

Joan Didion, ‘The Santa Anas’, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1969)

darkle (v.) to become gradually darker, as the days towards the end of the year [1868; apparently < earlier adv. darkling, ‘in the dark’ (c.15thC)]

This excellent word is an example of a back-formation – a word effectively coined in reverse. In medieval English, darkling meant hidden or concealed, or quite literally ‘in the dark’. In the 1500s, however, it was mistakenly interpreted as a verb (thanks to its –ing ending), and so darkle fell into occasional use as its supposed root.

Over the centuries that followed, darkle was applied in an array of different literal and figurative darkening contexts, and variously used to mean to hide in the dark, to grimace or show anger in your face, to come into view only slightly or indistinctly, and – in the early 1800s – to grow or to gradually become dark. As well as describing the darkening of the sky towards evening and nightfall, finally darkle also came to be used of the even more gradual darkening of the days as the year approaches its end and winter slowly starts to creep in.

Look around and lift thy heart

To take a thankful part

In nature’s mellow chorus;

Those tinted trees and bushes say

We need not send our joys away,

Tho’ darkling winter be before us.

Saumarez Smith, ‘Autumn Tints’ (1868)

erythrophyll (n.) a natural pigment that turns leaves red in autumn [1843; < erythro– (< Gk. erythros, ‘red’) + –phyll (< Gk. phyllon, ‘leaf’)]

Seexanthophyll

farewell summer (n.) the robin [1884]

Robins are not migratory birds, but as this term suggests their association with the festive period has led to them being seen in some people’s eyes as symbols not just of the winter, but of the end of summer too. According to folklore, moreover, a robin hopping over the threshold of your home forecasts a snap of cold and wintry weather ahead.

See alsofarewell fieldfare

filemot (n.) the colour of a dead or dying leaf [c. 1640; < Fr. feuillemorte, ‘dead leaf’]

Both filemot and the original French term from which it is derived, feuillemorte, have been in occasional use in English to describe the colour of dead leaves since the seventeenth century at least.

Hollantide (n.) the first week of November [1573; < lit. ‘All Hallows’ Tide’]

Etymologically, Hollantide is All Hallows’ Tide – that is, the period around All Saints’ Day, 1 November. According to traditional folklore, if rivers and duck ponds freeze over during Hollantide, then winter has struck too early and they will be ice-free by Christmas Day.

gab (n.) a spell of wintry weather when it is still autumn [Sc., 1916; < gab o’ winter, lit. ‘the opening of winter’ < gab, ‘mouth’]

Gab, like gob, has been used to mean a mouth since the seventeenth century, but its etymological roots run far deeper than that. Similar words in Scots, Irish and even Gaulish suggest this was likely an ancient Celtic word for a mouth, or a bird’s beak.

It is in the literal sense of an ‘opening’ (and therefore, a beginning) that gab later came to be used of a so-called gab o’ winter – a period of unseasonably early cold weather that strikes in the autumn, giving an unwelcome foretaste of what lies ahead.

go-harvest (n.) the late autumn, the changeable period between harvest time and the start of winter; a period of warm weather in early November [dial., 1735; ? < gossamer, lit. ‘goose summer’ + harvest, ‘harvest time, the autumn season’]

There is a rather convoluted etymological story to unpack here involving geese, spider’s silk and manmade fabrics. The tale begins in medieval Europe, where a ‘goose summer’ was a period of unseasonably warm weather around the time of St Martin’s Day,

11 November, when geese were said to be in best season. ‘Goose summer’ reduced to gossamer over time, and with it the word’s meaning shifted, eventually coming to refer to the dewy masses of spider’s silk often seen on tufts of grass at this time of year. From there, it was only an etymological hop, skip and jump to gossamer becoming the name of an equally silken gauze-like fabric in the early 1800s.

In Scots and a handful of northern dialects of English, meanwhile, ‘goose summer’ took a different route and was cut down to go-summer. Seemingly under the misapprehension that this must somehow derive from ‘summer’ (rather than autumn) and ‘go’ (rather than ‘goose’), a new term, go-harvest, fell into use in the 1700s as a more explicitly autumnal name for this period of warm, summer-like weather at the end of the year.

lecking-time (n.) a day or period of alternating sunshine and rain showers [dial., 1830; < leck, ‘to sprinkle with water’ ? < leak]

Likely derived from leak, to leck or lech something is to splash or sprinkle it with water, so a lecking-day or lecking-time is a frustratingly changeable day on which every so often the weather decides to do just that.

marcescent (adj.) descriptive of a leaf that withers and dies in the autumn, but remains attached to its tree [1727; < Lat. marcere, ‘to wither, to shrivel’]

A dead leaf resolutely clinging to its otherwise bare tree is a marcescent leaf. Sometimes this is merely an isolated anomaly, but some trees intentionally retain almost all their leaves in a marcescent state throughout the winter, perhaps as a means of shielding their bark and their branches from grazing animals, or else to give their delicate buds and new growth some much-needed protection come the springtime.

The word marcescent itself comes from the Latin verb marcere, meaning to wither. If you’re feeling a little withered and run down by the winter months yourself, then helpfully that word is also the origin of the adjective marcid, meaning faint, feeble or exhausted.

See alsoabscission

momijigari (n.) the Japanese custom of visiting forests in autumn to look at the changing foliage [< Jap. momiji, ‘red leaves’ + ‎gari, ‘hunting’]

Momijigari is essentially a far more exquisite-sounding equivalent of what might otherwise (in American English at least) be better known as ‘leaf-peeping’. A similar Japanese custom that could likewise come in handy at this time of year is shinrinyoku: a word for a relaxing trip to a forest taken to improve your health and wellbeing, it literally means ‘forest-bathing’.

queeving (n., v.) the gentle bending back and forth of trees in the wind [dial., 1809; < queeve, ‘to bend’]

As the autumn winds start to pick up, it is the queeving of the trees that gently shakes the dry leaves from their branches. As a verb, queeve is recorded in a handful of English dialects in a variety of senses (to bend, to twist, to tremble, to vibrate, to move to and fro), all essentially relating to some kind of backward-and-forward motion. The rather more specific definition above is just one of these, listed in a guide to the dialect of Bedfordshire back in 1809.

rorulent (adj.) coated in dew [1656; < Lat. rorulentus, ‘dewy’ < ros, ‘dew’]

English has a surprisingly large number of dew-dappled words like this one, including roriferous (producing dew), rorifluent (flowing with dew) and rorigenous (produced by dew). All of them ultimately come from the Latin word for dew, ros – which, despite appearances, makes them all etymological cousins of the herb rosemary. A reference to the plant’s apparent ability to survive on nothing more than coastal mist and condensation, the name rosemary comes from the Latin rosmarinus, literally meaning ‘dew of the sea’.

seasonal polyphenism (n.) the outward transformation of an animal in response to the changing seasons [< polyphenism, 1963 < poly–, ‘many’ + phenotype (< Gk. phaino, ‘to cause to appear’) + –ism]

Polyphenism is a curious biological phenomenon that allows multiple different forms (or phenotypes) of a species to develop from the same genetic makeup (or genotype), with these different forms produced as a result of environmental rather than genetic factors. What does all of that mean? Well, in nature these changes are borne out in all manner of different ways, from the sex of turtle hatchlings (which is determined by the temperature at which the eggs develop) to the social systems of ants (in which a single egg can turn into a worker, a soldier or a queen, depending on which is most in demand at the time). Seasonal polyphenism is the specific name given to another form of this kind of variation, in which a creature is able to alter its outward appearance, often drastically, in response to the time of year, while remaining genetically unchanged. It is this, ultimately, that accounts for the likes of stoats, hares and ptarmigan birds turning pure white ahead of the snowy winter months.

scuppered (adj.) of leaves, curled or blighted with frost [dial., 1847; ? < scupper, ‘to ruin’]

Scuppers are the openings in the side of a ship that allow any water thrown up onto the deck to run back into the sea. Whether they are related to the verb scupper, meaning to ruin, is unclear; in this sense, scupper is a Britishism not much heard elsewhere in the English-speaking world, which emerged in the early 1800s as military slang for a surprise attack. Whether there is any connection between either of these scuppers and the wintry adjective scuppered is likewise unclear – though from the point of view of a keen gardener, it is easy to imagine how an equally keen frost might ‘scupper’ an otherwise healthy autumn harvest.

sniveler (n.) a light frost in the early autumn [dial., 1904; < snivel, ‘to sniffle, to breathe through a congested nose’ < OE snyflan]

People have been snivelling when they have a runny nose since the very earliest days of Old English. Fast-forward a few centuries, and in the early 1800s a sniveler, or sniveller, was both a sharp, chilling breeze (just the kind that might cause a person’s nose to run) and ‘a slight hoar-frost in early autumn’, according to the English Dialect Dictionary.

St Andrew’s blast (n.) a period of late autumn frost and snow that tends to fall around St Andrew’s Day [1904; < St Andrew, patron saint of Scotland + blast < OE blæst, ‘gust of wind’]

The very earliest meaning of blast in English relates to the weather; in Old English a blæst was a strong gale or gust of wind (while the word itself is likely a very distant etymological cousin of the verb blow). All other uses of blast – an explosion, a loud noise, a riotously good time – are later developments and metaphors.

According to folklore, not only can you expect a blast of wintry weather around St Andrew’s Day, 30 November, but you can use the day itself to forecast the weather for the year to come. Place a tumbler of water, full to the brim, on a table on St Andrew’s Day, and if a single drop spills down the side, then you can supposedly expect the following year to be something of a washout. If the table remains dry, then so too will the year ahead.

swallow storms (n. pl.) periods of rough and windy weather around early October [dial., 1877]

Swallow storms are so called because they are traditionally said to blow in around the same time that the swallows that have spent the summer in the British Isles have the sense to depart for warmer climes ahead of the winter. The same storms can then be expected to blow in again in the middle of springtime the following year, when the swallows return.

See alsochelidonian

thunder-drop (n.) one of the large, widely dispersed raindrops that fall at the very beginning of a thunderstorm [1832]

Thundery downpours are by no means exclusive to autumn (not least in the British Isles), but as the weather begins to turn wetter and more unsettled, this may well be a term that finds increased currency towards the end of the year.

Her slow full words sank thro’ the silence drear,

As thunder-drops fall on a sleeping sea;

Sudden I heard a voice that cried, ‘Come here,

That I may look on thee.’

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ (1833)

water-dog (n.) a small grey raincloud hanging below a larger white cloud [1830; < water + dog, recorded as a nickname for various weather phenomena since the 1600s]

Like Inuit words for snow, so are the dialects of English chock-full of words to describe the shape, form and portentousness of different cloud formations. Water-dog is just one of them – and, for that matter, one that is apparently commonest in the ever more unsettled skies of autumn. According to folklore, moreover, water-dogs are said to portend harsher or wetter conditions to come:

Water-dogs [are] . . . small clouds of irregular but roundish form, and of a darker colour, floating below the dense mass of cloudiness in rainy seasons, supposed to indicate the near approach of more rain.

Robert Forby, The Vocabulary of East Anglia (1830)

wederognomonia (n.) a person’s apparent ability to use their bodily aches and pains to predict rough or changeable weather to come [1958; < weder, ‘weather’ + Gk. gnomon, ‘indicator, interpreter’ < gignosco, ‘to understand’]

Seecyclonopathy

wedge (n.) the V-shaped line formed by geese in flight [1869]

A flock of geese is known as a gaggle when on the ground, but it becomes a skein as soon as the birds take flight, typically forming a characteristic V-shape or wedge in the air. In fact, it is the long, trailing lines of birds that make up the wedge that are the reason for the change of name here, as the geese in flight are imaginatively said to resemble a strand of yarn being unwound from a skein of wool.

xanthophyll (n.) a yellowish pigment found in leaves that becomes visible in the autumn [1838; < xantho– (< Gk. xanthos, ‘yellow’) + – phyll (< Gk. phyllon, ‘leaf’)]

When the seasons change, the chlorophyll that ordinarily gives leaves their greenish hue starts to break down, giving other colours and pigments inside each leaf the chance to shine through instead. Among them are xanthophyll, which gives autumn leaves their yellowish hue, and erythrophyll, which turns them red.

zeitgeber (n.) a regular environmental event that keeps an organism’s biological clock in time [1971; < Ger. Zeit, ‘time’ + Geber, ‘giver, donor’]

All creatures have an inbuilt clock around which their regular natural activities, such as sleeping and eating, are synchronised. This internal clock is in turn kept in check by external events – like the rising and setting of the sun – known as zeitgebers, or literally ‘time-givers’. Different creatures work to different schedules, of course, so while we humans mostly rely on the so-called ‘circadian’ cycle of night and day every twenty-four hours, animals living by the seashore might operate around the twice-daily ebb and flow of the tide, for instance. In creatures that hibernate or migrate, it is the changing of the seasons that acts as their zeitgeber, prompting them to make all the necessary preparations in the autumn to ensure their safety and survival over the winter.

zugunruhe (n.) the restlessness of migratory birds ahead of their departure [1707; < Ger. Zug, ‘migration, movement’ + Unruhe, ‘restlessness, anxiousness’]

If you’re a cyclonopath who finds yourself feeling increasingly restless during the changing of the seasons, then you’re by no means alone. Adopted into English from German, the word zugunruhe (literally, ‘migration anxiety’) refers to the tense, jittery behaviour commonly seen in birds as they prepare for migration. This phenomenon was first observed in the early eighteenth century by biologists who noted that captive birds in zoos and private collections could not overcome their natural instinct to migrate, despite being confined to a cage and therefore unable to embark on the annual journeys they seemed so restlessly hardwired to complete.

See alsocosmognosis