This blog is for everyone who uses words.

The ordinary-sized words are for everyone, but the big ones are especially for children.



Monday 13 February 2012

Spot the frippet: cloud.

Well, today's Spot the Frippet is easy, especially if you live in Britain.

Clouds are really worth spotting, wherever you are. They're extraordinary. I mean, they look really light and fluffy, but the rain in a cubic mile of cloud can actually weigh as much as 400 elephants.

Or possibly even 402 elephants, if they've cut their toenails.

Clouds can be beautiful:



Colourful:



and sometimes deeply worrying:



No one knows all this better than the Cloud Appreciation Society.

Apart from the clouds in the sky, there's cloud computing, which as far as I can make out is when you use lots of computers from all over the place to solve your problems, instead of just the one computer and a lot of shouting.

Do hope you spend some of today on cloud nine*; or, if that's out of reach, cloud-cuckoo land**.

Spot the Frippet: cloud.  This word comes, bewilderingly, from the Old English word clūd, which means rock.

Rock? Good grief, that'd be even worse than 402 elephants.

*Cloud Nine is a 20th century expression meaning a state of bliss. It may be linked to the expression:

**cloud cuckoo land, meaning in a daydream. Cloud Cuckoo Land itself first appeared in Aristophanes' 414 BC play The Birds.

1 comment:

  1. I am a big fan of clouds and love your pictures. I once had a picture cut out of a diary called 'Pictures from the cloud gallery.' A Japanese picture. That's how I think of clouds: as exhibits in a kind of celestial gallery.

    ReplyDelete

All comments are very welcome, but please make them suitable for The Word Den's family audience.