[From the New York Times, August 29, 2011]
Two nights ago, Hurricane Irene was taking her sweet time, making her painfully slow path up the East Coast towards New York. And everyone, but everyone, was talking about the weather. New Yorkers, many of whom ordinarily exhibit a strong aversion to small talk, had given themselves carte blanche to do so until after the storm weakened and passed on to irrelevant Canada.
But what makes us so certain that talk of weather is small, anyway? What, after all, could be more fundamental to our existence as corporeal, terrestrial creatures than the fluctuations of the atmosphere through which we move? What is it, moreover, that we are neglecting to care about when we dismiss weather talk as the stuff of superficial exchange?
Etymology tells us that the banalization of weather is a recent development. In a number of languages the standard word for “weather” is exactly the same as the word for “time”: thus French le temps, Romanian timpul, Hungarian időjárás (literally “the walking of time”), to name a few.
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