“Every one will, I think, admit that another word, or at least an alternative name, for ‘anti-cyclone’ would be an addition to the language. Now that the facts of meteorology have become matters of common knowledge, it is surely regrettable that for so benign a phenomenon as an anti-cyclone, with its periods of windless calm, we should have no better name than this – a word which is somewhat pedantic in conversation, impossible in verse, whose end is stormy, while its prefix is loaded with suggestions of conflict, from anti-Christ to anti-vivisection.” Pearsall Smith–Letter to The Times of London (1911)
(Despite these protestations, ‘anti-cyclone’ is still the common term for the large-scale circulation of winds around a central region of high atmospheric pressure – clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. Pearsall Smith’s own suggestion for an alternative word was ‘halcyon’ – from the Greek – which today is an adjective but was originally a noun used to describe periods of calm and ‘quietude’.)
Title inspiration thanks to the Suburban Lawns. Can ya find it?
