Sniding Wind

A Dutch friend included the expression sniding wind in a poem she wrote today:

Language quiz image

Tea by the sea
A sniding wind
comes from the east
It blows through
All my layers
Making my hands
Go cold and colder
White frotty waves
Black seaweed
Pink tea gone cold too
Quick rush back home
On my cloggerdy clogs

More Tea by the sea poems.

After writing it, she realised that sniding wind was an Anglified version of the Dutch expression snijdende wind (cutting wind).

While sniding doesn’t exist in English, the word snide [snaɪd] does, and means “disparaging or derisive in an insinuative way” and “tricky, deceptive, false, spurious, contemptible” [source].

Snide comes from snithe [snʌɪð / snaɪð] (sharp, cutting, cold, piercing (wind/weather)), from the Middle English snithen, from the Old English snīþan (to cut, lance, hew, reap, mow), from the Proto-Germanic *snīþaną (to cut), from the Proto-Indo-European *sneyt- (to cut) [source]. So it could have been a snithing wind – it certainly was yesterday.

The Dutch word snijden (to cut, carve, intersect) comes from the same root, as does the German word schneiden (to cut, trim, slice), the Swedish word snida (to carve, engrave), the Icelandic word sníða (to trim, tailor).

One thought on “Sniding Wind

  1. When I read the title of this article, I couldn’t help but chuckle a little. Many (many) moons ago, there was a cartoon on TV in the US called The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Rocky was the flying squirrel, and Bullwinkle was the moose. Anyway, one of the features of the show was Dudley Do-Right of the Canadian Mounties. A constant villain of Dudley was Snidely Whiplash.

    It was all pretty funny in its day. But then, you’d be surprised what an 8 year old kid thinks is funny :-))

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