Talk:monsoon
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The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification (permalink).
This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.
Rfv-sense Arizona thunderstorm. --Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 20:14, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
- I recall this (though about Utah or Nevada rather than Arizona) from the novel The Lonely Polygamist. Google isn't letting me see many pages of it, though, and none with this word.—msh210℠ (talk) 21:35, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
- The monsoon season in Arizona is a period in the hottest part of the summer when the extreme heat in the deserts makes the air expand and grow lighter, which causes heavier air to rush in from the Gulf of California to the south. This is moist, tropical air, so thunderstorms are a characteristic feature of the monsoon season. Someone who doesn't know that monsoons are a phenomenon of moving airmasses might assume that the thunderstorms are what the term monsoon season refers to rather than being only something associated with it.
- In other words, monsoon as a thunderstorm is either an understandable mistake, or a back-formation from monsoon season, depending on whether this is isolated or has become part of the language. The similarity between the two means wording the search to distinguish them may be tricky, though I suspect "a monsoon" is more likely to be associated with the thunderstorm definition than "monsoon" with no article or a definite article. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:19, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
- I dont live there, but Im pretty sure that residents of Arizona dont call all thunderstorms "monsoons", or even just particularly powerful ones. It's specific to the very slow-moving and predictable late summer storms that blow in from the southwest every summer. In other words, it's the same thing that everyone else calls a monsoon, it just happens that Arizona's the only place in the southwest that regularly gets it. Soap (talk) 21:35, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
- RFV-failed. I also agree with Soap. - -sche (discuss) 23:21, 14 October 2012 (UTC)