If Eskimos Have Forty Words for Snow, What Do Oregonians Call Rain?

   
   A very light rain that draws a belly-dancer's veil over the moon and gossamer curtains over the mountain is called a mist.
   A mist that thickens and congeals until it has swallowed moon, mountain, fenceposts, trees, and the hand in front of your face is called fog.
   Rain that dots and dashes against the house like a stuttering Morse code but that barely puts a dew-drops-on-a-spider-web gleam on your hair when you go outside is called precipitation. An accumulation of such a rain is called measurable precipitation.
   Rain with sun shining through it is called "the time when foxes have weddings."
   When you feel a few drops of rain on your head and are just beginning to wish you'd brought your umbrella and then wonder if it's raining, after all, you would say, "It's just sprinkling."
   A rain that falls slowly and steadily with more space between drops than substance in the thing itself is called a drizzle, but if it throws itself down with a vengeance and then suddenly gives up with a laugh, it's called a shower.
   The rain that fights with itself, spitting and spluttering, knocking your hat off and driving into your face with tooth and claw, is called "raining cats and dogs."
   If the rain falls evenly, as though poured through a sprinkling can, it's called a good, hard rain. The good, hard rain that gushes down like out of a bucket is called "pouring buckets," as in, "It;s absolutely pouring buckets out there!" Another term for this kind of rain is a downpour, and if it washes great mud slides of the mountain into the valley and sets the creeks to a thunderous roar, it's called a torrential downpour.
   A rain preceded by flashing snatches of lightning, crashing catastrophes of thunder, and smashing calamities of wind is called a storm. If the winds uproot trees and rip off roofs with a leviathan temper, what you have is a tempest. It is best to keep the top on your teapot during a tempest.
   A rain that comes down in solid sheets for more than two days and two nights is called a deluge. If it goes on for forty days and forty nights, it's a flood.
   Very cold rain that stings with sharp, hot-needle stabs is called sleet.
   Cold rain that falls in big, white drops of lace antimacassars is called snow.
   A rain that awakens bright tulips and sunny daffodils with every splashing warm drop is an April shower, but the winter rain that bombards the mountain with cataracts and waterfalls is such that we would say, with Chaucer, "Lord this is huge rayn./This were a weder for to slepen inne!"