1103. Why do we talk about "heat waves" but "cold snaps"? This week, we look at the history behind these common weather phrases and other quirky idioms like "raining cats and dogs" and "under the weather." Then, we look at what kind of reading is best for improving your language skills, including research on the benefits of fiction versus nonfiction.
1103. Why do we talk about "heat waves" but "cold snaps"? This week, we look at the history behind these common weather phrases and other quirky idioms like "raining cats and dogs" and "under the weather." Then, we look at what kind of reading is best for improving your language skills, including research on the benefits of fiction versus nonfiction.
The 'heat wave' versus 'cold snap' segment was written by Karen Lunde. Karen's a career writer and editor who drifted into marketing — which turned out to be creative storytelling in business-casual clothes. These days, she helps solo business owners find the right words to talk about their work. Find her at chanterellemarketingstudio.com.
🔗 Share your familect recording in a WhatsApp chat.
🔗 Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.
🔗 Subscribe to the newsletter.
🔗 Take our advertising survey.
🔗 Get the edited transcript.
🔗 Get Grammar Girl books.
🔗 Join Grammarpalooza. Get ad-free and bonus episodes at Apple Podcasts or Subtext. Learn more about the difference.
| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475).
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.
| Grammar Girl Social Media: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook.Threads. Instagram. LinkedIn. Mastodon. Bluesky.
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to talk about why heat is a wave but cold snaps. And then we'll look at what kind of reading is best if you want to improve your language skills.
by Karen Lunde
Why do we call it a heat wave ... but a cold snap?
That’s the question listener Kate Morrical Towne sent in, and it’s an interesting one. If both are weather events related to temperature, why the metaphor mismatch?
Let’s start with "heat wave."
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "heat wave" didn’t appear in print until the late 1800s. So linguistically speaking, it's pretty modern! It referred to an extended stretch of unusually hot weather — typically several days in a row. The word "wave" was already used figuratively to describe things that spread or surge, like a wave of emotion or a wave of illness. Scientists had even started using "wave" to describe certain atmospheric patterns.
So the image of heat arriving in a wave — rolling in, hanging around, then receding — fit perfectly. It also distinguished it from the more generic “hot spell,” which was commonly used before "heat wave" became standard.
And being a grammar podcast, we had to take a detour to check out what spelling had to do with a stretch of heat; and it turns out the answer is "nothing" because the two meanings of "spell" have completely different origins in Old English and just happened to be spelled the same way now. Oh, well.
Next, let’s talk about "cold snap."
The word "snap" has a long history of describing things that are sudden, sharp, and short-lived. You can snap your fingers. A twig can snap underfoot. Cold weather can snap at your skin. The phrase "cold snap" has been around since at least the 1700s, and it vividly captures the experience of an abrupt, intense burst of cold air.
We do sometimes hear "cold wave," especially in meteorological contexts, but it tends to refer to a broader, longer-lasting event — think multi-day deep freezes that affect large regions. "Cold snap," on the other hand, is more conversational and localized. It feels personal. Like the weather just took a sudden turn and caught you off guard.
So, why don't we say "heat snap"? It's possible that term never became a thing because heat doesn’t usually arrive as suddenly as cold. It builds. It lingers. It overwhelms us slowly. So, metaphorically speaking, it rolls in like a wave. Cold, with its sudden sting, gets the snap.
And while we’re on the subject, let’s look at a few more quirky weather idioms.
You’ve probably heard someone say it’s "raining cats and dogs."
This idiom to describe a torrential downpour has been around since at least the 1700s. One popular theory is that it came from old England, where heavy rains sometimes washed debris — including dead animals — into the streets. Sad, but definitely memorable. Another less tragic theory ties it to Norse mythology, where dogs were associated with wind and cats with storms. Whatever the origin, it stuck. And it’s a lot more fun to say than “heavy rain.”
And we’re not the only ones with odd weather metaphors.
In French, it might be raining ropes. In Greek? Chair legs. In Danish, shoemaker’s apprentices. And in Afrikaans, old women with clubs. (Honestly, that one might be more terrifying than any thunderstorm.)
And the next time you find yourself "under the weather". . . maybe sing a sea shanty or two because that phrase comes from old nautical slang. Sick sailors were sent below deck—literally under the weather—to recover. Over time, the phrase came to mean feeling unwell, even if you weren’t on a ship being tossed around in a storm.
So the next time you’re caught in a heat wave or grumbling about a cold snap, remember: these phrases carry little pieces of history. They didn’t just describe the weather—they shaped how we think about it.
And at least it’s not raining apprentice cobblers, feisty old women, or furniture.
That segment was written by Karen Lunde. Karen's a career writer and editor who drifted into marketing—which turned out to be creative storytelling in business-casual clothes. These days, she helps solo business owners find the right words to talk about their work. Find her at chanterellemarketingstudio.com.
Next, we aren't finished with summer yet in the northern hemisphere, and I hope you're finding some extra time to relax and read, so it seemed like a good time to run this piece about different kinds of reading by Raymond Mar from York University in Canada.
by Raymond A. Mar
We all know that reading is good for children and for adults, and that we should all be reading more often. One of the most obvious benefits of reading is that it helps improve language skills. A major review of research on leisure reading confirmed that reading does indeed foster better verbal abilities, from preschoolers all the way to university students. But, does it matter what we read?
In four separate studies, based on data from almost 1,000 young adults, behavioural scientist Marina Rain and I examined how reading fiction and non-fiction predicts verbal abilities.
We found that reading fiction was the stronger and more consistent predictor of language skills compared to reading non-fiction. This was true whether people reported their own reading habits or if we used a more objective measure of lifetime reading (recognizing real author names from among false ones). Importantly, after accounting for fiction reading, reading non-fiction did not predict language skills much at all.
To measure verbal abilities in three of these studies, we relied on items from the verbal section of the SAT, the standardized test used by many U.S. universities when judging applicants. Thus, the measure of language skills employed in these studies is rather obviously tied to an important real-world outcome: admission to university.
Although it was somewhat surprising to discover that reading fictional stories predicts valuable language skills better than reading non-fiction, the repeated replication of this result across several studies increased our confidence in this finding.
In a follow-up study, a collaboration between my psychology lab at York University and a lab at Concordia University led by education professor Sandra Martin-Chang, we asked 200 people about their various motivations for engaging in leisure reading.
Those who reported that they read for their own enjoyment tended to have better language skills. Related to our previous finding, this association was partially explained by how much fiction they had read.
In fact, across several types of motivation, those motivations linked to reading fiction rather than non-fiction were invariably associated with better verbal abilities. On the other hand, when a motivation was more strongly associated with reading non-fiction it tended to be either unrelated to verbal abilities or associated with worse abilities.
For example, people who were motivated to read in order to grow and learn focused on reading non-fiction, so this attitude was actually associated with poorer language skills.
Based on these five studies, the picture is quite clear: it is reading stories, not essays, that predicts valuable language skills in young adults. But why does reading fiction have this unique advantage over non-fiction? We don’t yet exactly know, but we can rule out one obvious possibility: that fiction employs SAT words more often than non-fiction.
To investigate this possibility, we turned to several large collections of texts, containing around 680 million words in total. Words that appeared in the SAT were either less common in fiction compared to non-fiction, or the difference was so small it was negligible.
Fiction readers are therefore not doing better on SAT items simply because fiction contains more SAT words. This means that there must be something special about reading fiction that helps promote language skills. Perhaps the emotions evoked by stories help us remember new words, or maybe our intrinsic interest in stories results in a stronger focus on the text. Future research will hopefully uncover the reasons for this fascinating difference between reading fiction and non-fiction.
Regardless of the reasons, the fact that it is narrative fiction and not expository non-fiction that helps us develop strong language skills has important implications for education and policy.
When it comes to reading, it really is a case in which the rich get richer: A great deal of past research has established that those who read more tend to get better at reading, find it easier and more enjoyable and read more as a result. This results in a causal loop in which leisure reading reaps increasingly larger benefits for readers in terms of language skills. Remarkably, this remains true all the way from preschool to university.
These improved language skills in turn result in all kinds of important advantages, such as doing better at school, attaining a higher level of education, and being more successful at work.
In fact, one study of over 11,000 people found that children who were better readers at age seven had a greater degree of socio-economic success 35 years later! This held true even after accounting for important factors like their socio-economic status at birth, intelligence, and academic motivation. Leisure reading is important for developing language skills, which in turn are linked to key socio-economic outcomes.
Work from our lab, based on young adults, is beginning to clarify the association between reading and language abilities, pointing to the importance of reading fiction and not just non-fiction.
This means that it is important to foster a love for fiction in children, to promote the healthy habit of reading stories for pleasure as early as possible.
The current trend of governments prioritizing the sciences over the humanities in education runs directly counter to the evidence available. Given the benefits that verbal abilities provide in terms of success in school and in one’s career, fostering a love for stories in children should be a high priority for governments and educators.
That piece was by Raymond A. Mar, a professor of psychology at York University in Canada. It originally appeared in the The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
Finally, I have a familect story.
Hi, this isn't something that affected my entire family—it's just basically my wife and me—but we used to watch the show "I Dream of Jeannie" all the time way back when, and there was a character, Roger Healy, who would, with the best intentions, try to help, but end up doing the exact opposite in certain situations, usually involving Major Nelson. So my wife and I sort of adopted that thing and called it "Rogering." So if we're trying to help and we wind up doing the opposite in the process, we just say, "Oh, I really rogered that, didn't I?" So, that's what I have. Enjoy. Bye.
Thank you so much! TV, movies, and songs definitely give us a whole category of familects. One of mine is from the movie "City Slickers" and I remember another recent caller with a familect from "Gilmore Girls." Thanks for calling.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a word or phrase that you only use with your friends or family, leave a message on the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp. Be sure to call from a nice, quiet place, and if you want that number or link later, you can always find them in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast, and we have lots of other shows. Tomorrow, Nutrition Diva is talking about fish oil concerns. Here's a little clip:
Are concerns about rancid fish oil supplements legitimate? The short answer is yes. Recent research has found that a significant proportion of omega-3 supplements–both those sourced from fish as well as those sourced from algae–may be oxidized (or, to use a less technical term, rancid). In an analysis of 72 products sold in the U.S., 68% of flavored supplements and 13% of unflavored supplements exceeded accepted oxidation limits,
Again, that's the Nutrition Diva podcast. Check it out tomorrow.
Thanks to Morgan Christianson in advertising; Nat Hoopes in Marketing; Dan Feierabend in audio; and Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts, who is learning to do a very basic dive.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip a day book, "The Grammar Daily." That's all. Thanks for listening.