THE ORIGINAL Hooligans, it seems, were native Irish. They were, as one lexicographer nicely, and no doubt charitably, puts it, "a spirited Irish family whose proceedings enlivened the drab monotony of life in the South London suburb of Southwark in the late 19th century."
I offer you this gem of useless information on a Friday morning for no better reason than that I find it interesting, and that it happened to occur to me -as I mulled over the striking thought that words often acquire a meaning specific to a certain context.
It happens, too, in meteorology. Have you ever wondered, for example, about the difference between "fair" and "cloudy"? Your humble scribe, it must be said, wonders about such things while, like Edward Lear,
He sits in a beautiful parlour
With hundreds of books on the wall;
And drinks a great deal of
Marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.
Both words, "fair" and "cloudy", imply relatively uneventful weather. If the forecaster expects rain, fog, or even worse, she will say so, but if nothing like this is expected, she can use one of three terms cloudy, fine or fair.
Cloudy, as the word implies, means the sky will be covered, or almost so, by cloud; Fine is used if very little cloud is expected; and the forecast will specify fair if cloud is expected to cover between about onethird and twothirds of the sky.
To take another example, "rain is usually foreseen as likely to be accompanied by generally cloudy conditions but showers are often separated from one another by what may be described as "bright" or "sunny" intervals.
"Bright" in this context is used when patches of blue sky are likely but cloud is expected to cover the sun for most of the time. "Sunny", on the other hand, implies that there will be extended periods when the sun will be visible. For obvious reasons the terms "bright" or "sunny" are not used when talking about night time; clear spells" is used instead.
No great international authority, scientific or otherwise, has decreed what shall be meant by all these terms. They are intended, by and large, to be interpreted in the same way as they would be in everyday speech, or as they might be defined in the dictionary - but in a rather precise way. The precision, however, is focused on what the forecaster means; whether it is reflected in what is generally understood is quite another question.