Everyone knows the Inuit have a hundred words for snow. Everyone is wrong. The anthropologist who started it counted four, and the number has been inflating at dinner parties for a century, because the myth flatters a suspicion we all carry: that a language keeps its vocabulary where it keeps its problems.
This county runs the whole experiment on one map. It can be 105 degrees in Ukiah while Fort Bragg sits under fog at 58, which means Mendocino County may be the only place in America where every word in this column is optional. Keep that in mind. We’ll come back to it.
Heat, the plain one
Like “summer” before it, heat is the boring one. Old English hǣtu, sibling of hāt, hot — a word that has meant the same thing since before English could spell. No borrowed god, no Latin pedigree. The interesting part is what we’ve stacked on top of it: heat is now what a criminal fears, what a playoff team brings, what a rivalry has. The oldest word in the drawer, and we still can’t stop lending it out.
Scald, and the kitchen full of Romans
Latin had calidus, warm, and that one root has been simmering in the language ever since. Scald comes from excaldare — literally to wash in hot water, a word the Romans used for a comfortable bath and English repurposed for the injury. The caldaria, the warm pot, became the cauldron, crossed to France as chaudière and came back across the Atlantic as chowder, which is to say a bowl of clam chowder is named for the kettle, not the clams. Scientists took calor, heat, and coined the calorie, a unit for warming water that now mostly measures guilt. And the French built nonchalant from chaloir, to heat up over something — so a nonchalant person is, literally, someone who declines to get warm. Keeping your cool has been grammar for eight hundred years.
Lukewarm, the word that says it twice
Lukewarm is the department of redundancy’s finest work. Middle English had leuk, meaning tepid, all by itself. Then somebody bolted “warm” onto it for safety, and we’ve been saying “warm-warm” ever since, mostly about coffee and applause. Its Latin cousin tepid, from tepere, to be moderately warm, at least has the decency to say it once.
Muggy, a word made of drizzle
Muggy should mean hot. It doesn’t, quite — it means the air has given up. The word comes from an old dialect verb mug, to drizzle, traced to the Old Norse mugga, mist. So the stickiest word in the summer forecast is built out of cold Scandinavian fog, which any resident of the Mendocino coast will tell you is simply accurate reporting.
Calenture, the fever that turned the sea green
Here is the best heat word English ever had and then lost. Calenture — Spanish calentura, fever, off the same calēre root as the nonchalant French — was the sailors’ madness of the hot latitudes. Becalmed in the tropics, men would look out at the ocean and see it as a green field, cool meadow grass to the horizon, and step off the ship to walk in it. Ships’ doctors wrote it up for two centuries; poets borrowed it for another two. We dropped the word when steam power shortened the voyages, but the condition survives. It is available in any parked car in Ukiah in August.
Fahrenheit and Celsius, two men and an upside-down thermometer
The scales are just surnames. Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was an instrument maker who built better thermometers than anyone alive and pinned his zero, more or less, to the coldest brine he could mix. Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer, drew the cleaner scale — zero to one hundred, freezing to boiling — except backward. On the original Celsius thermometer, water froze at 100 and boiled at 0, so August got colder as it got hotter. Sweden flipped the scale within a year of his death, which is the polite Scandinavian way of saying no.
Temperature, which used to mean self-control
Temperature has no heat in it at all. It’s Latin temperare, to mix in the right proportion — the same root as temperance and temperament. Your “temperature” was originally your blend, the balance of humors that made you you, and your temper was that balance holding. Which means losing your temper is not an outburst; it is, etymologically, a mixing error. The word for the number on the thermometer and the word for shouting in traffic are the same word, and August knows it.
Diablo, the wind nobody here jokes about
One heat word in this column gets no punchline. When the hot, dry wind comes downhill from the northeast in fire season, the North Bay calls it a Diablo wind — the devil’s wind, named off Mount Diablo — and every scanner in the county gets quieter and more serious at the same time. It’s the sibling of Southern California’s Santa Ana, the wind that turns heat from a discomfort into a fire behavior forecast. Redwood Valley learned what it means in October 2017. The oldest habit in language is naming the thing you fear after the devil, and nobody in Mendocino County has ever asked for that one back.
Inferno, which is freezing at the bottom
And the grand finale: our biggest word for hot is not about heat. Inferno is Latin infernus, simply “the place below” — hell’s etymology is real estate, not temperature. English hell is colder still: it comes from an old Germanic root meaning to cover or conceal, kin to “helmet.” The hidden place. The Norse underworld, Hel, was frozen. Even Dante, who gave the inferno its brand, froze the bottom of it — the ninth circle is a lake of ice with Satan stuck in it to the waist. We took a word for a cold hidden basement and made it the hottest word we own. The thermometer has been lying from the start.
The bottom line, such as it is
So, no — English does not have a thousand words for heat, any more than the Inuit ever had a hundred for snow. It has a couple of dozen doing all the work: a bath that became a burn, a fever that turned the sea into a meadow, a scale that ran backward, a devil in the wind and a hell that froze over before we ever got there. A language keeps its vocabulary where it keeps its problems, and English, on the evidence, has a heat problem.
Mendocino County, as usual, has the exemption. When the words run out in Ukiah this month, the county keeps one cure no dictionary lists, sitting off the coast at 58 degrees and a hundred percent humidity. Drive west until the vocabulary stops applying. The fog doesn’t have a word for heat either. It’s never needed one.
Word Junkie is a column for people who own too many dictionaries and are not sorry.