In your area/country, did you have a word or phrase to describe the static white noise on a television set not tuned to a channel?
Bonus points if there's a known onomatopoeia to describe the sound.
Nothing more fancy in Boston than "snow".
Yeah that's a common one, I wonder if it would seen as more or less commonly like that depending on how cold the local climate is.
California, here, and not any of the parts that get snow. (Closest we get is hail, which feels like it happens maybe twice a decade.) We called it "snow," too. :)
French: "neige" is used. Yes, it means snow.
It's χιόνι which means snow in Greece and we are not very cold.
That’s for sure
War of the ants
We called it static.
What prompted this question is some Japanese TV service ended this past weekend for a relative and the word to describe the static noise was "sand storm".
Thought it might be interesting to hear what it's called elsewhere.
So Japan still uses analog broadcast TV? Maybe it's different for other US TVs, but since the switch to the digital broadcast system my TVs show black when a channel is not available. Snow has gone the way of the old test pattern of years ago.
Analog went offline in Japan around 2010/2011 if my memory serves me correctly, but some still have digital receivers that works with the RF jack. Now more or less it's out of style and the static is just proverbial.
Schneesturm (snow storm) or Ameisenkrieg (ant war) in German.
We always called it Ameisenfußball (ant soccer).
Had the exact same two in my childhood and youth in Finland. Probably some nuance differences in language, but semantically very similar ones! Muurahaissota and lumisade 🕺
for me it was Ameisenrennen (ant race)
Snow
"the war of the ants" (myrornas krig)
/Sweden
Know the term ‘Ants Soccer’, quite similar (Germany)
Ameisen Fußball? Never heard of that, super cool
Snow or static. It's cosmic microwave background radiation - the remnants of the big bang.
Some of it is cosmic background radiation - it's also machine vibrations, manufacturer defects, power line radiation, and nearby appliances. The more remote and well shielded you are the more likely it's pure background radiation... but in a big city it's likely to be local radiation sources. The inverse square law has a big role here.
Always called it "Ant races"
Me too! It was about 30 years ago for me.
That's neat! What's your country/region?
Oregon, USA about 30 years ago
I use a related phrase in Photoshop. If you have something selected, the movement around the thing is "running ants".
Flimmer
That's cool. Something like "flickering", I would guess?
Yeah, pretty much. It's danish btw 🙂
In Poland it was „śnieży” (snowing).
How’s that pronounced? Sorry for coming achoo with too many cultural questions
…and if you are interested in the sound of static rather than the image, then the Polish word is: „szumi”. This can be approximated in English as: 'shoomy'. The 'sz' sound does sound like static.
The funny thing is that our 'sz' (in „szumi”) and 'ś' (in „śnieży”) usually sound exactly the same to English or French speakers, while for us they are quite distinct sounds.
I am not even able to write it phonetically in English. Ask Google Translate - its pronunciation is close-enough.
In IPA it is: /ɕɲɛʑɨ/
It's snow
We called it the "Chinese rice fight"
...the 80s was a different time lol
Hahaha, if you remove the stereotype and reference to China, it makes for a reasonable approximation of the visuals and sound, imagining a torrent of rice being blasted at you.
Back in the days when we all had antennas and cable hadn't been born yet, the static stations were a great thing to watch if there might be a tornado in your area. Apparently if one formed, it would significantly change the look of the snow on the TV and give you a warning to quickly head to the basement. I never actually saw it happen, but there were a couple times we had local warnings and my parents plopped me down to keep an eye on the TV.
Never heard about this. Interesting tid bit.
I remember getting our first tv about 1982 I think.
I actually started questioning whether this was something my parent's told me to keep me busy, but turns out it's a real thing.
In Chiba city, it is described as "The sky above the port"
Static or Snow where I grew up in the US Southeast
Same!
Dreh die Antenne nach links, ich krieg nur rauschen hier unten.
It would be white noise, “weißes rauschen”, but nobody ever said the “white” part.
UK here, we just called it static.
fleas
Ah, I can see that! A stormcloud full of fleas would be extra scary.
Something like that. I always heard it from my parents and grandparents that "it's with fleas" or "you can see with fleas" when that happened. I never knew what was the link between those, but it sounds funny all the time, lol.
In Germany it's called "Weißes Rauschen" (so akin to white noise, white rustling / murmuring?). It seems to be both about the sound (rauschen) and the visuals (weiß).
The sky above the port.
Salt and pepper fight!
In Ukraine we say that "the image/display is snowing" (зображення/екран сніжить)
In Spain it was "snow".
Also in Italian, we used to call it "neve" (snow).
'Sneeuw' in the Netherlands.
'Ruis' in Flanders
In Croatia, we call(ed) it 'snow' (snijeg).
No. But I did learn that if you put your sunglasses over one eye and look at it, it makes a trippy 3D motion effect.
Static
In Poland we say that it's show or it's snowing.
Yea white noise and static
In China we call it snow and describe the sound using the exact onomatopoeia as rain
We called it "flies" or "snow".
sssssssss - dumbass kid
In Dutch: ant football
Same in Hungarian
"Bures" -- javanese
We call this "fleas" in my language
Polish: śnieg (snow) or kasza/kaszka/kaszana (groats)
It's "neige" which means "snow" in french
Śnieg: snow
just "static" in the states in the 1990s. I swear to god, sometimes I could see something in it. Could have been psychosomatic.
Sometimes there was channel interference or something for sure. I know this because sometimes I would stay up late at night to try to see boobies. I don't remember the reason or channel or anything, maybe it was on an adult channel and it mostly wouldn't come through because it wasn't being paid for? Back when you othersise had to find boobies in the woods on paper, or had a friend with a single father who worked a lot.
The world was a lot more simple back then. I can't imagine the stress of being a kid today.
Snow rain
... and sound was just called "hiss" or "white noise"
Salt and pepper fight!
برفک
barfak
literally "little snow"
Makes it sound cute. Instead of watching the news, I'll look at a little snow.
i've never interpreted that as little snow but "snow like". like لواشک isn't a small version of lavash it's similar to lavash.
Hmmm maybe you're right actually
PSHHHHHHH
"Snow" in Norway. Alternatively "Snowball fight"
It's just static.
Salt and pepper fight.
The Hiss.
Brazil: chiado.
Or "chuviscado", that could mean light rain.
Rice
What caused this? Shit used to terrify me as a kid
Essentially the TV just plays whatever data is there on that frequency band. When there is nothing on the channel, it picks up background radiation from space; cosmic gamma rays that just happened to have lengthened to the wavelengths that the TV happens to be playing on.
Snowfall in finnish.
In québécois French, we would call it "neige" or "statique". Snow or static.
Drizzle
turkish: "karıncalanmış"
Ah, Cosmic background radiation. AKA static. Sounds like: ksshhhh Comedy name: snowstorm in the arctic.
Snow flakes
In my circles it was just ants but seeing all the mentions of snow makes me think of the book Snow Crash which more or less refers to just that :)
"Myrornas krig"
"The war of the ants"
This goes so fucking hard
Which country/language? In Turkish, the idea is similar but the wording a bit different, "karıncalanma" (being ant-y) is commonly used. Same thing is also used for when a body part goes numb due to having it in weird position for some time, like sleeping with your arm under your body or sitting on the toilet too much and having your legs be numb.
There is also "parazit yapma" (making/doing parasites) used for the television thing.
Swedish (:
As for the numbness, if a foot goes numb, then we normally say that we "have sand in the foot" or that "the foot is asleep"