• Psythik@lemm.ee
    6·
    1 year ago

    This map is inaccurate. I’m from Arizona and “sunshower” is commonly used here.

    • andrew@lemmy.stuart.funEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m also from Arizona, been here my whole life, and I have no word for this. I haven’t ever heard anyone say sunshower either. Different circles maybe.

  • Limeey@lemmy.worldEnglish
    23·
    1 year ago

    This is a terrific example of where a choropleth (Ideally by county) would have been much more effective than a heat map.

    • lolgcat@lemmy.ml
      6·
      1 year ago

      It’s worth noting that the Times released this tool a decade ago. IIRC, around 2015 there was also a push for better colorblind friendly color palettes, especially on the heat map space (I remember watching a matplotlib demo, maybe, with viridis support). While there’s many visualization practices we do better at now, and while this could be due for a redux, I still think it"s one of the best interactives to date. It’s an OG for sure.

      • Limeey@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        That’s fun, and it’s a much better use of heatmap since it’s just a binary scale (least-most similar). When we’re showing discrete options rather than a continuous “similarity” we don’t want to use heatmaps because they cause undesirable blurring.

        Really what the OP is trying to do is show which areas use which phrases. A heatmap could have been used where we have multiple visualizations - one for each phrase - using “Popularity” to show smooth distribution. I assume that the source data is not by county level and instead aggregated so the choropleth never would have worked great.

  • Crapattf2@feddit.uk
    6·
    1 year ago

    In the UK , well the part of the UK I live in we say “it’s a monkey’s birthday”

    Well more actually most of the time we don’t say anything about it all

  • contextual_somebody@lemmy.world
    32·
    1 year ago

    I’m from the Deep South. You couldn’t tell by my accent. I moved away for college and lived overseas and on both coasts. I didn’t know what a “sun shower” was until I was in my mid/late twenties and said “the devil is beating his wife” in front of my friends. That’s the only term for it I had ever heard up to that point.

    • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
      4·
      1 year ago

      damn. i was like 55% certain that this was a shitpost and no one actually said that until i read your comment. we almost got a shitpost on c/shitpost. maybe it’s not too late to get a meme on c/meme

    • Adulated_Aspersion@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      Are you me? This is very similar to my story regarding this phrase. I have just heard the phrase associated with the situation. Not that rain falling while the sun is out is CALLED the devil is beating his wife. Rather, it’s just the indicator somehow.

  • Bilb!@lem.monsterEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    From Northeastern PA, and yeah I immediately thought “oh, a sunshower?”

    But yeah, the devil doesn’t have a wife wtf

  • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
    18·
    1 year ago

    I grew up in the CA bay area and always called them sunshowers. I didn’t make that up: I called them sunshowers when I was a kid because the people around me called them sunshowers.

    As an aside, I also taught linguistics at the university level for about 10 years. I do question the accuracy of many of Katz’s charts because they very often do not match people’s expectations, and beyond the level of “you expected this because you didn’t know any better”. I would take them with a grain of salt. That’s not really a dig on Katz, either: difficult to study anything at this scale.

  • son_named_bort@lemmy.world
    10·
    1 year ago

    Grew up in Georgia. My mom would refer to it as the devil beating his wife. She got it from her mom who presumably got it from her parents. I have no idea why that expression, never got an answer for that.