Weather, precisely

Weather is talked about every day and pinned down almost never. Spanish keeps a separate word for each kind of rain: el chubasco is short and violent, la calabobos so fine that one is wet before noticing, and el aguacero is the downpour after which the street looks like another street. The pair worth holding on to sits a little further down the list. English says « frost » for two different things: the white crust one scrapes off the windscreen, and the night below zero that killed the blossom. Spanish separates them — la escarcha is the crust, the deposit, the thing one can touch; la helada is the event, the hours of cold that produced it. A grower needs the second word and a driver the first, and « frost » makes both of them ask again.