Well, if the weather you are experiencing in your neck of the woods is anything like we have going on here right now, then rain is the name of the game. Which means coffee, soup, and listening to Jimi Hendrix and Alice in Chains (and other musicians from the Pacific Northwest).

It also means more wordwatching. Today, I return to one of the themes touched on in my November 16 post on variants of aspen, namely, that lexical variation often appears in lexical domains where it is least expected. In the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies, this is perhaps no more evident than in the responses to the prompt "What would you call something that catches rain as it runs off the roof of a building?" Besides a couple of informants who answered "the ground", the distribution of responses from the 70 LAMR informants** looks like so:

The figure shows a wide range of variation, with gutter(s) being the most common variant and eave(s) and eave trough(s) vying for second position. Trough(s) also appears in its bare form and as part of the compound rain trough(s), a compound that seems reasonable in that the bare form trough most likely has a strong association, even for us city slickers, with a type of livestock feeder. On the other hand, rain gutter(s) may strike some readers as pleonastic, despite the term gutter being used at times in other domains not associated with rainfall, for instance, publishing and bowling.

Kurath (1949) found gutters to be the standard response to this prompt in this work in the eastern United States but also found several local terms, particularly in the North and the MIdwest. In his work, eaves troughs was primarily found in New England, parts of New York, and the Ohio Valley, as well as among older informants in western Virginia and the Carolinas, where he also found instances of troughs. Thus, LAMR informants favor the standard variant of the eastern states and use several other variants with roots in the speech of the eastern states.

A few interesting tokens appear in the oncers, namely, the poetic rain drain; the apparent slip of the tongue gusset, by an informant who worked for years as a seamstress; and eave drops, which does have some relation to the matter at hand, but is perhaps most likely now associated with listening in on the conversations of others. (See the Online Etymology Dictionary for a bit more on that.) And, on a related note, see my next post on eggcorns and malapropisms.

If you would like to do a word search on these variants, click here.

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References

Kurath, Hans. (1949). A Word Geography of the United States. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

*Thanks to Heather for contributing this title, unknowingly, in a very unrelated facebook discussion earlier this week.

**Keep in mind that informants could offer multiple variants; others did not offer any terms at all, as water running off their roofs in the arid West was scarcely an issue.