Weather average, going on ordinary
In colloquial Australian the word "average" implies that something is far from the mean of expected (or at least hoped_for) values. It means something that is inherently undesirable. When 'your' football team is beaten by a team wearing black and white (surprisingly this phenomenon crosses code boundaries as well as State borders) it would be described as a "pretty average result".
In the same way 'ordinary' implies something out of the usual in a negative direction. When some thug (I don't have to describe their guernsey, do I) king-hits your best player that would be a "fairly ordinary bit of play".
The use of the terms in this way is not restricted to sport. Tuesday 24 June was an excellent specimen of the circumstances in which they might be applied to the weather.
The minimum temperature for the day was 1.5C early in the morning. About 3pm I emailed a friend to say the temperature hadn't got about 4C. (It had staggered up to about 6.5C by 9pm.)
It rained more or less all day, and I got fed up with using electricity to pump water up the hill, just to have it overflow the main tank and run back down again. This led the catch-tank to overflow very soon after.
A small drain was then dug to lead the water towards a lawn, rather than simply filling up the pit in which the tank stands. We totaled 14.4mm for the day.(following 8.8mm the previous day).
To add to the misery of the day cloud-base was around 900m as it was well down the face of the Taliesin Hills behind our house.
Getting the quadrella of unpleasantness into line it was also very windy. Here is a Doppler radar image from 1439.
The most interesting element of this is the patch of red of the edge of the dark blue. The software which generates these images cycles colours so if the windspeed is >100kmh (the top of the dark blue range it goes to the far end of the scale and uses dark red for speeds between 100 and 110. (Memo to self: check the next cyclone to see if that captures a Doppler image with over 200kph.)
In the same way 'ordinary' implies something out of the usual in a negative direction. When some thug (I don't have to describe their guernsey, do I) king-hits your best player that would be a "fairly ordinary bit of play".
The use of the terms in this way is not restricted to sport. Tuesday 24 June was an excellent specimen of the circumstances in which they might be applied to the weather.
The minimum temperature for the day was 1.5C early in the morning. About 3pm I emailed a friend to say the temperature hadn't got about 4C. (It had staggered up to about 6.5C by 9pm.)
It rained more or less all day, and I got fed up with using electricity to pump water up the hill, just to have it overflow the main tank and run back down again. This led the catch-tank to overflow very soon after.
A small drain was then dug to lead the water towards a lawn, rather than simply filling up the pit in which the tank stands. We totaled 14.4mm for the day.(following 8.8mm the previous day).
To add to the misery of the day cloud-base was around 900m as it was well down the face of the Taliesin Hills behind our house.
Getting the quadrella of unpleasantness into line it was also very windy. Here is a Doppler radar image from 1439.
The most interesting element of this is the patch of red of the edge of the dark blue. The software which generates these images cycles colours so if the windspeed is >100kmh (the top of the dark blue range it goes to the far end of the scale and uses dark red for speeds between 100 and 110. (Memo to self: check the next cyclone to see if that captures a Doppler image with over 200kph.)
Comments