![Snow on the Line - geograph](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Snow_on_the_Line_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1143962.jpg)
"The wrong type of snow" or "the wrong kind of snow" is a phrase coined by the British media in 1991 after
severe weather
Severe weather is any dangerous meteorological phenomenon with the potential to cause damage, serious social disruption, or loss of human life. Types of severe weather phenomena vary, depending on the latitude, altitude, topography, and atm ...
caused disruption to many of
British Rail
British Railways (BR), which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was a state-owned company that operated most of the overground rail transport in Great Britain from 1948 to 1997. It was formed from the nationalisation of the Big Four British rai ...
's services. A British Rail press release implied that management and its engineering staff were unaware of different
types of snow
Classifications of snow describe and categorize the attributes of snow-generating weather events, including the individual crystals both in the air and on the ground, and the deposited snow pack as it changes over time. Snow can be classified ...
. Henceforth in the United Kingdom, the phrase became a byword for
euphemistic
A euphemism () is an innocuous word or expression used in place of one that is deemed offensive or suggests something unpleasant. Some euphemisms are intended to amuse, while others use bland, inoffensive terms for concepts that the user wishes t ...
and pointless excuses.
Background
The phrase originated in an interview conducted by
James Naughtie
Alexander James Naughtie FRSE (surname pronounced ; born 9 August 1951) is a British radio and news presenter for the BBC.
Between 1994 and 2015, he was one of the main presenters of Radio 4's the ''Today programme''. In his 21-plus years on ...
on
BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history from the BBC' ...
's
''Today'' Programme on 11 February 1991.
British Rail
British Railways (BR), which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was a state-owned company that operated most of the overground rail transport in Great Britain from 1948 to 1997. It was formed from the nationalisation of the Big Four British rai ...
's Director of Operations, Terry Worrall, was asked to comment on the adverse effects of the unusually heavy
1991 snowfall on railway services that winter. Worrall explained that "we are having particular problems with the type of snow, which is rare in the UK". Naughtie replied "Oh, I see, it was the wrong kind of snow," to which Worrall replied, "No, it was a different kind of snow". The exchange prompted a headline in the London ''
Evening Standard
The ''Evening Standard'', formerly ''The Standard'' (1827–1904), also known as the ''London Evening Standard'', is a local free daily newspaper in London, England, published Monday to Friday in tabloid format.
In October 2009, after be ...
'' saying "British Rail blames the wrong type of snow" which was swiftly taken up by the media and other papers.
The cold snap had been forecast and British Rail had claimed to be ready for the coming snow. However, the snow was unusually soft and powdery and too deep to be cleared by
snowploughs – it needed
snowblower
A snow blower or snow thrower is a machine for removing snow from an area where it is problematic, such as a driveway, sidewalk, roadway, railroad track, ice rink, or runway. The commonly used term "snow blower" is a misnomer, as the snow is ...
s. The snow found its way into electrical systems and caused
short circuit
A short circuit (sometimes abbreviated to short or s/c) is an electrical circuit that allows a current to travel along an unintended path with no or very low electrical impedance. This results in an excessive current flowing through the circuit ...
s and
traction motor
A traction motor is an electric motor used for propulsion of a vehicle, such as locomotives, electric vehicle, electric or hydrogen vehicles, elevators or electric multiple unit.
Traction motors are used in electrically powered rail vehicles (ele ...
damage in trains.
[Gourvish 2002, p. 274.] For traction motors with integral cooling fans and air intakes pointing downwards – the type that is still common on British
electric multiple unit
An electric multiple unit or EMU is a multiple-unit train consisting of self-propelled carriages using electricity as the motive power. An EMU requires no separate locomotive, as electric traction motors are incorporated within one or a numbe ...
s – the problem was made worse as the air intakes sucked up the loose snow. Meanwhile, the snow also became packed into
sliding door
A sliding door is a type of door which opens horizontally by sliding, usually horizontal to a wall. Sliding doors can be mounted either on top of a track below or be suspended from a track above. Some types slide into a space in the parallel w ...
mechanisms and into
points
Point or points may refer to:
Places
* Point, Lewis, a peninsula in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland
* Point, Texas, a city in Rains County, Texas, United States
* Point, the NE tip and a ferry terminal of Lismore, Inner Hebrides, Scotland
* Point ...
, causing them to fail.
In addition, low temperatures resulted in problems with electric current collection from the
third rail
A third rail, also known as a live rail, electric rail or conductor rail, is a method of providing electric power to a railway locomotive or train, through a semi-continuous rigid conductor placed alongside or between the rails of a railway t ...
.
Many electric services had to be replaced by
diesel
Diesel may refer to:
* Diesel engine, an internal combustion engine where ignition is caused by compression
* Diesel fuel, a liquid fuel used in diesel engines
* Diesel locomotive, a railway locomotive in which the prime mover is a diesel engin ...
haulage, and emergency
timetables
A schedule or a timetable, as a basic time-management tool, consists of a list of times at which possible tasks, events, or actions are intended to take place, or of a sequence of events in the chronological order in which such things are i ...
were introduced. Long delays were commonplace – up to eight hours in some cases. The disruption lasted over a week.
Usage
![158XXX , North Wingfield](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/158XXX_%2C_North_Wingfield.jpg)
The phrase "the wrong type of snow", "the wrong kind of snow" and variants appear periodically in British media reports concerning railway incidents brought on by adverse weather, with an intended polemic effect of instilling disbelief in the reader. Since "the wrong type of snow" has entered British English phraseology, it has come to be regarded as an example of a
snowclone
A snowclone is a cliché and phrasal template that can be used and recognized in multiple variants. The term was coined as a neologism in 2004, derived from Journalese, journalistic clichés that referred to the number of Inuit words for snow.
H ...
, a type of re-usable
cliché
A cliché ( or ) is an element of an artistic work, saying, or idea that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being weird or irritating, especially when at some earlier time it was consi ...
with many variants.
During the
December 2009 European snowfall
December is the twelfth and final month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars and is also the last of seven months to have a length of 31 days.
December got its name from the Latin word ''decem'' (meaning ten) because it was or ...
, several
Eurostar
Eurostar is an international high-speed rail service connecting the United Kingdom with France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Most Eurostar trains travel through the Channel Tunnel between the United Kingdom and France, owned and operated sep ...
trains broke down in the
Channel Tunnel
The Channel Tunnel (french: Tunnel sous la Manche), also known as the Chunnel, is a railway tunnel that connects Folkestone (Kent, England, UK) with Coquelles ( Hauts-de-France, France) beneath the English Channel at the Strait of Dover. ...
, trapping 2,000 passengers in darkness; newspapers reported "wrong type of fluffy snow".
Following the destruction of the coastal railway line at
Dawlish
Dawlish is an English seaside resort town and civil parish in Teignbridge on the south coast of Devon, from the county town of Exeter and from the larger resort of Torquay. Its 2011 population of 11,312 was estimated at 13,355 in 2019. It is t ...
,
Devon
Devon ( , historically known as Devonshire , ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South West England. The most populous settlement in Devon is the city of Plymouth, followed by Devon's county town, the city of Exeter. Devon is ...
during severe weather in 2014, the ''Daily Telegraph'' carried a cartoon by
Matt with a notice reading, "Trains cancelled – Wrong sort of seaweed". On 12 January 2016, ''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'' reported on
Southeastern
The points of the compass are a set of horizontal, radially arrayed compass directions (or azimuths) used in navigation and cartography. A compass rose is primarily composed of four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west—each se ...
train delays caused by "strong sunlight" and the
low winter sun with the headline, "Wrong kind of sunlight delays Southeastern trains in London".
The emergence of the phrase "the wrong type of snow" came about during a period when the
privatisation of British Rail
The privatisation of British Rail was the process by which ownership and operation of the railways of Great Britain passed from government control into private hands. Begun in 1994, it had been completed by 1997. The deregulation of the industr ...
was being widely debated in the media. Journalists frequently sourced
anecdotal evidence
Anecdotal evidence is evidence based only on personal observation, collected in a casual or non-systematic manner. The term is sometimes used in a legal context to describe certain kinds of testimony which are uncorroborated by objective, independ ...
to compose stories about failures in the performance of railway operators. Stock phrases involving "
leaves on the line" and snow were used in
headline
The headline or heading is the text indicating the content or nature of the article below it, typically by providing a form of brief summary of its contents.
The large type ''front page headline'' did not come into use until the late 19th centur ...
s to ridicule seasonal disruption, to such an extent that they are now said to have passed into Britain's
folklore
Folklore is shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. This includes oral traditions such as tales, legends, proverbs and jokes. They include material culture, ranging ...
and are considered to be established in the "collective British consciousness".
The two have also been combined into "the wrong sort of leaves" in media coverage.
The popularity of the "wrong type of snow" phrase has been attributed to its expression of a national sense of disappointment with British infrastructure, along with a fading sense of national pride and romantic associations with railways.
The phrase has been cited as an example of poor
corporate communication
Corporate communication is a set of activities involved in managing and orchestrating all internal and external communications aimed at creating favourable point of view among stakeholders on which the company depends.Riel, Cees B.M. van; Fombrun ...
and
public relations
Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing and disseminating information from an individual or an organization (such as a business, government agency, or a nonprofit organization) to the public in order to influence their perception. P ...
. Its longevity and persistence in the public consciousness has been attributed to a highly effective but poorly chosen
analogy
Analogy (from Greek ''analogia'', "proportion", from ''ana-'' "upon, according to" lso "against", "anew"+ ''logos'' "ratio" lso "word, speech, reckoning" is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject ( ...
that has "stuck" with its audience and is subject to interpretation in other contexts; what originated as a simplified explanation of a technical problem has become a popular code for a lame excuse.
The "wrong kind of/type of" part of the phrase has itself been shown to exemplify
semantic change
Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift) is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from ...
, having undergone a process of
grammaticalization
In historical linguistics, grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions (i.e. nouns and verbs) become grammatical markers (such as affixes or p ...
to move from an impartial description of weather conditions to become a politically loaded
signifier
In semiotics, signified and signifier ( French: ''signifié'' and ''signifiant'') stand for the two main components of a sign, where ''signified'' pertains to the "plane of content", while ''signifier'' is the "plane of expression". The idea was ...
of failure.
See also
*
*
*
References
* Allan, Ian. ''Motive Power Monthly'' (May 1991)
*
*
Notes
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wrong kind of snow
Rail transport in the United Kingdom
Euphemisms
English phrases
Snow in the United Kingdom
Newswriting
Snowclones
1991 neologisms