Exercise: Write about the wind.

It was a blustery afternoon at our writing workshop in Petaluma. Looking out the window, I gave the prompt "Write about the wind." Writer Tommie Whitener wrote about The Caine Mutiny and went on from there.

The wind described as a typhoon in The Caine Mutiny was a dastardly devil; a thriving thing trying to destroy all in its path.
I prefer to think of a soft, gentle wind on a tropical beach, probably much like the Hawaiian beaches the Caine sailors enjoyed after the typhoon.  Such a wind would be loving, caressing.

Why don’t we have two different words to describe two different winds? Probably because we are not in touch with nature as much as we should be. When word nuance is important to a culture, the culture comes up with different words to describe each nuance.  For example, I have heard that where the quality of ice and snow is a matter of life and death, indigenous peoples there have descriptive words which categorize each by quality. So it should be with wind.