It's raining grits!

Actually, it's snowing pellets or Graupel :  "precipitation that forms when supercooled droplets of water condense on a snowflake, forming a 2–5 mm ball of rime ice; the snowflake acts as a nucleus of condensation in this process." They look like tiny balls of styrofoam, and they crunch under your shoes.

According to The American Heritage Dictionary, the German word Graupel is a diminutive of Graupe, meaning "hulled grain, probably of Slavic origin; akin to Russian krupa, groats."

The modern English word groats comes from the same Old English root as grits:

O.E. grytt (pl. grytta) "coarse meal, groats, grits," from P.Gmc. *grutja-, from the same root as grit, the two words having influenced one another in sound development. In Amer.Eng., corn-based grits and hominy  (q.v.) were used interchangeably in Colonial times. Later, hominy meant whole kernels that had been skinned but not ground, but in the U.S. South, hominy meant skinned kernels that could be ground coarsely to make grits. In New Orleans, whole kernels are big hominy and ground kernels little hominy. Online Etymology Dictionary

Therefore, it's raining grits. QED.

Comments

[gail]

PS, note the dog tail in the upper left corner of the second photo. Charley had to get into the picture.

[gail]

Still coming down like crazy. It makes a sizzling noise when it falls, like a donut in a deep fryer.

[joated]

Great work with the etymology. We are on the cusp of having the rain change over to ice here as the temperatures have fallen from 40 degrees at 7 AM to 32 at 10:15.

[CGHill]

Do not try this at the Waffle House:

"I'll have some grits."

"Hominy, sir?"

"Oh, about four or five dozen."

[MC]

I love grits. Hard to find in the Pacific Northwest. Here they call it polenta. But it's just not the same.

Can't get grits at Denny's here either. We don't have Waffle Houses - they put all of them on all 4 sides of every exit of every interstate south of the Mason Dixon. Used 'em all up.

[JWebb]

Waded out yesterday morning to brush snow off the tiny little Dish Network dish on the property so we could decide which of the 250 channels we wouldn't be watching anyway. The little dish is mounted on a five-foot-high steel tube. The snow base came to within less than four inches of the dish itself. You do the math. Next year, I'm getting me some snowshoes, is what I'm doing...and an Al Gore dartboard.