People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 February 1897 — Wave Names. [ARTICLE]

Wave Names.

I have a note of some curious names given locally to the waves on different parts of our coast that may be worthy of record. These were culled from The Family Herald a few years ago. I cannot give the exact date. The names are curiously varied and sometimes not a little suggestive. The Peterhead folk call the large breakers that fall with a crash on the beach by the grim name of “Norrawa (Norway) carpenters.” On the low Lincolnshire coast, as on the southwestern Atlantic fronting shore of these islands, the grandly long unbroken waves are known as “rollers. ” Among East Anglians a heavy surf, tumbling in with an offshore wind, or in a oalm, is called by the expressive name of a, “slog, ” while a well marked swell, rolling in independently of any blowing, it called a‘ ‘ home. ’’ ‘ ‘There is no wind, ” a Suffolk fisherman will say, “but a nasty home on the beach. ” Suffolk men also speak of the “bark” of the surf, and a sea covered with foam is spoken of as “feather white. ” The foam itself is known as “spoon drift. ” So in the vernacular we have it, “The sea was all a feather white with spoon drift.”Notes and Queries.