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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve mostly heard some variation on sunshower in Texas because while they’re not common, they’re not super rare either. We also rarely get “sun-derstorms” (dunno what else to call it) in Texas.
Yeah. I’m red/green color blind, so the colors coupled with the tiny boxes makes this pretty useless for me. Can anyone share what area of the country calls it the devil one?
I’m not colorblind and it’s just not visible. Most of the country is red, and then NY/Philly area is blue. Also southern florida where the NYers live, northern Minnesota for some reason, and sparely throughout new england, all also blue. Majority of country is red but with an unexplained shading that goes from low saturation to high.
if you squint really hard there’s a white-ish area overlapping Alabama and Mississippi that looks like it might be greenish white.
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