It pays to enrich your word power

Heavy rain this afternoon

In his entry in Trad's Diary for 9 July, Hugh Johnson has coined a new word. He is, he says, a pluviophile, a lover of rain, and he extols the pleasures of watching rain. I'm also glad to think of myself as a pluviophile, enjoying both the spectacle of it falling and the effect it has.

Hugh also mentioned a related pleasure, the scent released by soil after rain. There is a word for this: petrichor, first brought to my attention by the American horticultural scholar Bobby Ward. It's a neologism invented by two evidently classically-minded Australians in 1964, from the Greek petra, rock, and ichor, the fluid flowing in the veins of the gods. They state that it's caused by aromatic compounds from plants being stored in soil and rock being released on wetting, which is presumably why it's so ephemeral. I think of it mostly in conjunction with the rain on parched African soil, a first  fine, careless rapture.