From aaqsiiq to zucchini, discover words and phrases from the world’s polar regions in Bernadette Hince’s book, Cold Words.
This unusual ‘ice-breaking’ book collects the English words of the Antarctic and the Arctic for the first time. These words relate to weather, ice and snow, auroras, clothes, food, housing, social structures, wildlife, plants, politics, as well as many other aspects of polar life. The terms are presented with scientific precision, a helpful interpretative commentary and moments of whimsy.
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bergy seltzer
Arctic
A fizzing sound produced when air trapped in iceberg ice is liberated.
Bergy seltzer: Sizzling sound comparable to that of Seltzer water which icebergs emit when they melt. It is caused by the release of air bubbles that were retained in the berg at high pressure.
1966 BB Baker jr, ed Glossary of oceanographic terms
Want to hear bergy seltzer but don’t have a sonar or an iceberg handy? All that is needed is a glass of water and an ice cube. Drop the ice cube in the water and put your ear down near the top of the glass. The steady fizzle you hear is bergy seltzer.
1 Sept 1980 TN Davis U Alaska Fairbanks online
[Svalbard] The ice pops and fizzes as it melts into the sea. Bergy seltzer, it’s called: the sound of gases being reunited, of ancient air escaping from its prison after thousands of years and re-entering the atmosphere.
2015 J Aitchison Shark and the albatross
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featherbed
Macquarie Island
(Usually singular) A quaking or floating bog on a coastal raised beach terrace of Macquarie Island. Such bogs can be up to 5 m (16½ ft) deep, tremble when you walk on them, and are hazardous to cross.
The Macquarie Island party of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–14 named a particular landscape feature on Macquarie Island Feather-bed, referring to its yielding surface.
[Macquarie Island] A peaty morass .. springs and trembles underfoot (this peculiarity has earned it the name of Feather-bed swamp).
7 Jan 1912 LR Blake in Lost in the mists (2014)
Two days of pulling leaden, muddy boots from sucking feather-bed.
1966 ‘Emmo’ Fog ’N Bog [Macquarie Island ANARE]
When not crossing rivers or stones, we were driving mostly on boggy peat featherbed, as on Macquarie Island.
2021 J Williams Aurora [ANARE Club, Melb]
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kabloona
Arctic
[Arctic America qavdlunâq foreigner of European race, white person (Rink 1887); W Greenlandic qallu eyebrow (Fortescue Inuktun); Greenlandic kablunæt; Iñupiaq ķavlunaķ brow of hill or of human (Iñupiat Eskimo dict)]
1 A European foreigner; a non-arctic or non-Inuit person; ‘not one of us’.
also qallunaat and with much variation
It is often suggested that the word refers to the prominence of eyebrows on a non-Inuit face.
The Groenlanders call those of their Country Inguin, and strangers Kablunassouin.
1662 A Olearius Voyages and travels German transl J Davies
The Greenlanders relate a very ridiculous Story, as well concerning the Origin of our Colonies (whom they stile with the Name of kablunæt).
1745 H Egede Description of Greenland Danish transl
Being informed that we were Europeans (Kablunae), they answered that they were men Innuit.
9 Jan 1830 J Ross Narrative of a second voyage
This man .. said that a party of “Kabloonans” had died of starvation a long distance to the west … From the mutilated state of many of the bodies, and the contents of the kettles, it is obvious that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative as a means of sustaining life.
1 Sept 1854 J Rae R Geog Soc Lond J
The word kabloona means “white man.” It sometimes carries a scarcely concealed tone of contempt.
1942 M Gissen in Kabloona
Are the white men, the kablunait, who now rule the Arctic, deliberately and ruthlessly weighting the scales against the survival of the Eskimo tongue by making one or other European language the sole — or in Greenland the principal — medium of instruction in all schools?
1967 D Jenness Arctic Inst N Am Tech Paper
Qallunaat is an Inuktitut term that describes anyone who is not of Inuit ancestry.
2014 Qikiqtani Truth Commission QTC final report: achieving Saimaqatigiingniq
2 Of or relating to a non-arctic person or culture.
They are much more dependent upon the missionary, upon his supply of clothing, and upon his kablenak or European food, than is good for them.
1909 W Grenfell Labrador
[Baffin Island] These are kabloona anoraks, for tourists. These are not anoraks for hunters.
1998 J Turk Cold oceans
Making sure you’re on the job from one specified time to another is a Qalluunaat way of working, not an Inuit way.
2010 MR Evans Fast runner
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nangiarneq
Arctic
Anxiety or disorientation while kayaking (see kayak vertigo).
also nangiarnek
The Greenlandic indigenous term for an attack of intense anxiety and fear while out on the open sea is nangiarpok .. (alternatively nangiarnek).
1993 RC Simons in Culture, ethnicity, and mental illness
Nangiarneq … is triggered when the kayak hunter is far out on a sea so dead calm that the horizon has been obliterated and the sky and sea have become one.
1997 I Lynge Meddelelser om Grønland
Kayak dizziness, nangiarneq, could .. strike the best of all.
2017 B Sonne Worldviews of the Greenlanders
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sledgie
Antarctic
A type of durable plain biscuit (see sledging biscuit).
If one is prepared to brave the rigours of extended field trips, one should live on the time honoured pemmican and sledgies.
1963 K Hicks Wilkes Hard Times
The Macquarie Island Hutwives Cookbook — subtitled ‘100 different ways to avoid Fray Bentos and sledgies’.
1979 J Scott Aurora [ANARE Club, Melb]
We shared stories, ate Sledgies, and passed wind.
2013 B Gaull Chill out
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bernadette Hince is a dictionary-maker and natural historian with a passionate interest in language and the world’s cold places.
She has written about polar food, words and environmental history. She is the author of The Antarctic Dictionary.
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