Apricity, prison warmth, and goose snow
'The cold never bothered me anyway', sings Elsa. Never have falser words been spoken.
I feel like been left out in the cold without anything to shield me from the elements. As I type this article, my fingers are icicles sticking to the hard and cool metal of my laptop.
If you’re based in the UK, most likely a thick layer of snow has covered your roofs, roads, and pavements. Weather forecasters reintroduce words like 'Arctic' and 'Baltic' in their forecasts. If they're lucky, they may even get a chance to talk about the 'Beast from the East', or its assonant sibling, 'Pest from the West'—phrases only coming into popular usage within the past few years. In lieu of developing such hyperbolic phrasings to describe the wintry weather, perhaps it is worth exploring words in other languages or old English.
First, there's no shortage of words to describe the sense of retreating from the cold. There's the classic, 'hibernation', but perhaps more palatable to humans is, for instance: the Scots coorie ('to hunker down', from coor, cognate of the word 'cower'). More generally, you could just 'latibulate', find a corner and hide there. You also even have, 'nuddle', 'snoozle', and 'croodle', to name a few.
Moreover, if you're looking for a word to describe your winter quarter or where you'd do your coorieing, you have 'hibernacle'—a doublet of hibernation, both words linked to the Latin hibernare ('to winter, occupy winter quarters'), ultimately from hiems ('winter'). A hibernacle is any refuge where one can wait out the winter until warmer climes return.
However, the jury is still out on a word to describe the desire to stay in your hibernacle on a cold day, swaddled and nuddling under one's heavy and warm blanket, and not wanting to leave it. Dysania or 'not wanting to get out of bed in the morning', and its sibling, clinomania (lit. 'bed addiction') are close contenders, but they don't quite capture the feeling of not wanting to venture out into the cold.
I propose 獄温布団 (goku nuku futon), a combination of 獄温 (goku nuku, lit. prison warmth) and futon. The first half of this neologism, goku nuku, appears in a music video called 布団の中から出たくない ('I Don’t Wanna Get out of Futon') by the band 打首獄門同好会 (Uchikubigokumon-Doukoukai). Here is the video in question:
In brief, the music video features a little penguin struggling to get out of its futon due to the cold. Despite its initial struggles, the penguin eventually realises it needs to use the toilet and grits its teeth to brave the cold. It overcomes this first obstacle and receives a burst of dopamine, allowing it to continue on with its day and face more challenges. So, every time you think of not wanting to get out of bed because its cold, you could just think of your toasty, but perhaps restricting, goku nuku futon!
Now out of your goku nuku futon, let's go onwards, upwards, and outwards! If you're looking for a word to describe basking in the warmth of the sun when you go off for a winter morning stroll or for your commute to work, you might be in need of 'apricity' or 'apricate'. Apricity comes from the Latin aprīcitās, ultimately from aperiō ('to open, uncover'). It is a hapax legomenon recorded in the OED in 1623.
For a coordinate term, apricity is evocative of the Japanese 木枯らし (kogarashi), meaning a 'cold northerly wind that blows in late autumn and early winter, blowing the leaves off the trees'. As a indicator of the advent of winter, kogarashi has been used in Japanese poetry since the Edo period (1603–1868). Beyond this, it also has scientific weight, as Japan’s Meteorological Agency records the first kogarashi every year.
Finally, when you're apricating and appreciating the kogarashi, you just need sometimes a good word or phrase to describe the cold and the snow. The thesaurus is bursting with synonyms. On one hand, you have classic words like 'nippy' and 'icy'; on the other, if you wanted to show off your learned lexicon, you might opt for 'hyperborean' or 'hibernal'—unless you did classics, or just extremely well-read, I'll excuse your liberal usage of the thesaurus.
Beyond these, other languages can be much more colourful. Take French, you can say: 'il fait un froid de canard', literally, 'it makes a cold of duck', or 'it's a duck-like cold'. Simply put, it just means that it's bitterly cold. But why are ducks associated with the cold? The origin of the term allegedly stems from the belief that the optimal time to hunt ducks is during the winter, where hunters must endure bitterly cold temperatures while remaining motionless, to let their prey to approach close enough to be shot. Un froid de canard describes then the severe cold that permeates into the bones.
Similarly, you could evoke a relative of the duck, the goose. In Chinese, you have the idiom, 鵝毛大雪 (é máo dà xuě, lit. goose feather great snow), which describes big and heavy snow fall. This phrase originates from the Tang dynasty (618–907) poet Bai Juyi (白居易)'s Joyful Visit to Li Langzhong on a Snowy Night (雪夜喜李郎中见访). The original line goes:
可怜今夜鹅毛雪，引得高情鹤氅人。
How pitiful it is, tonight's goose feather-like snow, arousing the lofty sentiments of a person clad in a crane-like coat.
É máo dà xuě makes me think of of snowflakes falling and whirling in the sky like a myriad of feathers, covering and cloaking one in white to the point where one resembles a crane. Rather than pitiful, what delightful an image that is!
Equipped with all of these new terms and phrases, our now-learned weather forecasters and Elsas alike should sing no longer:
Here I stand in the light of day
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway
Rather, they should sing:
Here I apricate in the light of day
Let the 鵝毛大雪 (é máo dà xuě) rage on
The froid de canard never bothered me anyway