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Bonus points if there's a known onomatopoeia to describe the sound.
Nothing more fancy in Boston than "snow".
Yeah that's a common one, I wonder if it would seen as more or less commonly like that depending on how cold the local climate is.
California, here, and not any of the parts that get snow. (Closest we get is hail, which feels like it happens maybe twice a decade.) We called it "snow," too. :)
War of the ants
We called it static.
What prompted this question is some Japanese TV service ended this past weekend for a relative and the word to describe the static noise was "sand storm".
Thought it might be interesting to hear what it's called elsewhere.
So Japan still uses analog broadcast TV? Maybe it's different for other US TVs, but since the switch to the digital broadcast system my TVs show black when a channel is not available. Snow has gone the way of the old test pattern of years ago.
Schneesturm (snow storm) or Ameisenkrieg (ant war) in German.
We always called it Ameisenfußball (ant soccer).
Had the exact same two in my childhood and youth in Finland. Probably some nuance differences in language, but semantically very similar ones! Muurahaissota and lumisade 🕺
Snow
"the war of the ants" (myrornas krig)
/Sweden
Snow or static. It's cosmic microwave background radiation - the remnants of the big bang.
Some of it is cosmic background radiation - it's also machine vibrations, manufacturer defects, power line radiation, and nearby appliances. The more remote and well shielded you are the more likely it's pure background radiation... but in a big city it's likely to be local radiation sources. The inverse square law has a big role here.
Flimmer
That's cool. Something like "flickering", I would guess?
Yeah, pretty much. It's danish btw 🙂
It's snow
Back in the days when we all had antennas and cable hadn't been born yet, the static stations were a great thing to watch if there might be a tornado in your area. Apparently if one formed, it would significantly change the look of the snow on the TV and give you a warning to quickly head to the basement. I never actually saw it happen, but there were a couple times we had local warnings and my parents plopped me down to keep an eye on the TV.
Never heard about this. Interesting tid bit.
I remember getting our first tv about 1982 I think.
I actually started questioning whether this was something my parent's told me to keep me busy, but turns out it's a real thing.
We called it the "Chinese rice fight"
...the 80s was a different time lol
In Chiba city, it is described as "The sky above the port"
UK here, we just called it static.
In Germany it's called "Weißes Rauschen" (so akin to white noise, white rustling / murmuring?). It seems to be both about the sound (rauschen) and the visuals (weiß).
Dreh die Antenne nach links, ich krieg nur rauschen hier unten.
It would be white noise, “weißes rauschen”, but nobody ever said the “white” part.
The sky above the port.
In Ukraine we say that "the image/display is snowing" (зображення/екран сніжить)
Salt and pepper fight!
In Croatia, we call(ed) it 'snow' (snijeg).
No. But I did learn that if you put your sunglasses over one eye and look at it, it makes a trippy 3D motion effect.
Static
Yea white noise and static
In Poland we say that it's show or it's snowing.
We call this "fleas" in my language
sssssssss - dumbass kid
In China we call it snow and describe the sound using the exact onomatopoeia as rain
We called it "flies" or "snow".
Polish: śnieg (snow) or kasza/kaszka/kaszana (groats)
"Bures" -- javanese