"Hotter than &%$#!"
Given that it's the heart of summer here in the South, most conversations at some point turn toward how insanely hot it is (and it is, indeed). But facebook is here to remind me that it is hot just about everywhere in the United States right now, including the Rocky Mountain West. In this blog, I take a look at comparative expressions for the weather in the Middle Rocky Mountains, as I did in a 2012 publication*; however, here I focus only on the expressions for hot weather.
In the collection of 70 interviews, conducted in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming from 1988 to 2004, data for this item were collected by asking informants if they were aware of any expressions used in their respective communities for "the weather is hotter than." The informants' responses and the frequencies of these responses are presented in the diagram below:
Figure 1: Informant responses to the prompt "the weather is hotter than" in LAMR (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)
As illustrated, the vast majority of speakers used references to the netherworld to complete the comparative expression for hotter than. Comprising a classic Zipfian curve, 29 informants provided hell, 13 Hades, 4 blazes, and 2 Hade, before the inevitable string of hapax legomena, or oncers, found in nearly all such collections of linguistic atlas data. Among these oncers is a reference to the keeper of Hell himself -- the devil -- as well as several very specific features of Hell, which include the hinges of Hell and the hubs of hell. As the word Hell was apparently taboo to some informants, they provided spellings of the word, rather then using the expression in a recorded interview. A couple informants offered the archaic expressions Billy Hell and Billy Blue Blazes.
Perhaps you or a loved one has a favorite comparative expression for the heat that we are experiencing in the U.S. If so, please let me know what it is in the comments section below. In the meantime, hope you are finding a way to stay cool.
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*Antieau, Lamont D. 2012. "Talk about the weather: Comparative expressions in the Middle Rockies." American Speech 87(4): 432-446