Charles Dickens as meteorologist and climate watcher.

WORDPLAY

David Astle

As Sydney temperatures seesaw, and Brisbane is hammered in hail, there's freakish weather in America too. You may have seen the footage: snow banks in Buffalo, a static Niagara. Even the Michigan town of Hell froze over. The buzz-phrase in headlines and bulletins is the polar vortex.

Lazily I'd presumed the phrase to be hatched by the isobar brigade. Sounds the part – scary, authoritative. But Ben Zimmer, word columnist for the Wall Street Journal, has traced the low-pressure zone to Charles Dickens, of all people.

While the English author didn't coin the phenomenon, he helped to spread it. As editor of Household Words, a weekly gazette that ran through the 1850s, Dickens oversaw a weather article called Air Maps. The writer was Anon in keeping with the period's fashion, just as Dickens was Boz in his early career. The 1853 story described circular gales bearing Arctic chills, crafting the phrase in transit.

We shouldn't be shocked. Weatherwise, Dickens has a long rap sheet. Even the word Dickensian emits sooty air, a London miasma engulfing squalor and pickpockets. When Pip bumps into Magwitch, the cemetery is mist-bound. In Bleak House, Dickens writes of 'a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes'. While Sairey Gamp, the nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit, has bestowed her surname onto a large umbrella.

John Sutherland is responsible for the research. The retired literature professor has released a lively pocketbook called The Dickens Dictionary, revealing Boz in regard to cats, trains, dwarfs, cannibals, onions, bastards and pubs, to name a few categories. Plus weather, of course, a constant pulse in the Dickens bloodstream.

Meteorology students could embark on lamer PhDs, aligning the author's work to the calendar's synoptic charts. When Nurse Sairey brandished her gamp, London had its wettest year, the sodden 1841 where Britain copped almost a metre of rain. The sulphuric pea-soupers plaguing so many Dickensian chapters likely exerted a glacial push towards Parliament's Clean Air Act a century later.

Smells are the other common motif. Oliver Twist is haunted by Fagin's frying sausages; Our Mutual Friend is sneeze-ridden with dust; Pip's nostrils are assaulted by lime kilns, forge fires and Pumblechook's grain shop.