Snow...or snow it seemed


 The past 2 or 3 days we have had a "polar vortex" travel over us, with wintery temps and precipitation.  The temps just hovered a smidge above the freezing point, so what snow we got didn't stick.

Several times I have heard or read somewhere that the native Inuit have multiple names for different types of snow.  I guess we do as well, to a certain extent, though for the most part our culture isn't as permeated with snow as theirs would be, I guess.  We have snow, sleet, slush...anything else?  I am sure I missed some.

Yesterday when it started "snowing" here it was small, super dry pellets, like pictured above.  Gary called it a "hominy snow."  I have heard him use that term for it before, but had never bothered to look it up.  I'd always thought it was just local colloquialism, but it led me down a couple of rabbit trails looking up terms and definitions.  

It actually originates from German; Graupel.  I copied and pasted the below from a Google search:

Graupel (/ˈɡraʊpəl/; German: [ˈɡʁaʊpl̩]), also called soft hail, hominy snow, or snow pellets, is precipitation that forms when supercooled water droplets in air are collected and freeze on falling snowflakes, forming 2–5 mm (0.08–0.20 in) balls of crisp, opaque rime.

Looking that up lead me to search "hominy."   To me hominy is sold in a can in the grocery store, though I vaguely remember Gary might have told me that his granddad used to make it.  Just saying the word "hominy" makes my taste buds remember the flavor and texture.  I know it as corn that had been soaked in lye with whole, puffed up kernels.  It's then rinsed and sold in cans; you can buy either the white or yellow corn. But when I searched I found this as the definition:

Dictionary
noun
US
coarsely ground corn used to make grits.

  So hominy snow is so named because it resembles ground corn.  

This leads to me the branching rabbit trail of there being different kinds of hominy.  But hominy in any form isn't really my thing.  Gary likes it pretty well.  We haven't had it in quite a while, so maybe I should get some for him.  But not the hominy grits kind, the whole kernel kind all soupy in a can.  But I will leave the snow/hominy rabbits trails at this point. 

If perchance, you should want to pursue hominy further, you may do so.  Haha...  

After the hominy snow yesterday we got a few snowflake flurries, but like I said, nothing stuck around for long.  Thank goodness.  

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