Hello friends! Got a little snow there, didja? Co-Owner Chuck is here to talk about one solution for the weather: sweaters, and it all rolls out from there.

We've written before about "semantic satiation"—that odd sensation you get when you repeat a word so many times in a row that its meaning sort of disintegrates in front of you, leaving a jumble of nonsensical letters where there was once a perfectly sturdy and meaningful word. (Try it yourself: Say "pillow" once, and you'll think of a soft, plushy item where you might want to rest your head, or, if you sleep like I do, shove between your knees. Say it 100 times in a row, and it will suddenly feel like you're speaking Icelandic.)

I'm currently experiencing the opposite effect, whatever that might be called ("semantic starvation"?) After decades of saying a particular word with little or no thought about what it really means, that original meaning has, in an instant, smacked me in the face like a wet piece of woven wool. The word is "sweater."

We recently ran a question about the fact that British people call this particular garment a "jumper." (Etymological aside: This likely derives from the French word for "skirt," which is "jupe," and has nothing to do with the act of jumping. Not so the American full-body fashion item known as the "jumper," short for "jumpsuit," which originated during the early 1900s as the favored uniforms of parachuters jumping out of airplanes.)

"Oh, how fun!" you might think, as I did, upon learning this particular Britishism. (Personally, I learned this from the excellent song "Where's Me Jumper" by the punk band The Sultans of Ping FC, who aren't British at all, but Irish). But then you might think, as I did, "Hold on. Imagine living your whole life calling this thing a jumper, and then learning that Americans call it a sweater." A sweater! A sweater. A SWEATER.

It's just disgusting, this awful word, and it's been hiding in plain sight my whole life, wrung dry of its horrid provenance. Worse, it comes out every year during my favorite season, crisp and glorious autumn. Sweater weather! Gross!

While the British "jumper" may have nothing to do with Brits jumping, the American "sweater" has everything to do with Americans sweating. It originated among rowing teams who needed a garment to wear while training that would make them sweat and lose weight. (Etymological aside #2: This same garment gave us the term "crew neck," for the collar-less head-hole popularized by these same crews of sweaty rowers. This is not to be confused with "boat neck," of course—that's a style of collar-less neck invented by French naval officers who needed shirts with wide enough head-holes to allow easy removal in case the wearer fell overboard. This same sartorial logic also gave us bell-bottoms, which were designed to be removable without taking off your shoes.)

See also: Dead Metaphors. These are the phrases that have been repeated so often that they've lost their original metaphorical luster. I think of them as metaphors that have eaten themselves. An example favored by an old English professor of mine: "The foot of the mountain." Once upon a time, that phrase would have conjured a vivid image of a mountain standing like a human: at its summit, a head; along its sheer side, a face; at its hilly lower extremities, a foot. Now it just means the bottom of the mountain.

Dead metaphors are fun to spot in the wild, because once you start noticing them, they're everywhere: "gone belly up" (a reference to dead fish), "flying off the handle" (imagine a loose axe head), "brand new" (we ran a question about this one a couple weeks ago—it refers to a branding iron that has just been pulled from the fire). Dead, dead, dead, all of them.

And too bad, too; some of those are great metaphors. Although in the case of "sweater" (and, by extension, "sweatshirt," "sweatpants," and "sweatsuit"), I'll leave you by quoting the tagline to "Pet Sematary," as we head into the official start of the winter season: Sometimes dead is better.