Names
In the southwestern United States, a dust devil is sometimes called a "dancing devil", "dirt devil". In Death Valley, California, it may be called a "sand auger" or a "dust whirl".
The Navajo refer to them as chiindii, ghosts or spirits of dead Navajos. If a chindi spins clockwise, it is said to be a good spirit; if it spins counterclockwise, it is said to be a bad spirit.
The Australian English term "willy-willy" or "whirly-whirly" is thought to derive from Yindjibarndi or a neighbouring language. In Aboriginal myths, willy willies represent spirit forms. They are often quite scary spirits, and parents may warn their children that if they misbehave, a spirit will emerge from the spinning vortex of dirt and chastise them. There is a story of the origin of the brolga in which a bad spirit descends from the sky and captures the young being and abducts her by taking the form of a willy-willy.
In Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, and Jordan, they often reach hundreds of metres in height and are referred to as djin ("genies" or "devils").
Egypt has its fasset el 'afreet, or "ghost's wind". In Iran, this kind of wind is usually called "Gerd Baad", or "round wind".
Among the Kikuyu of Kenya, the dust devil is known as ngoma cia aka, meaning "women's devil/demon".
In Brazil, a dust devil is called redemoinho after moinho de vento ("windmill"). In some traditions, it contains a dancing Saci. Also in Portugal known locally as remoinho (translated to continuous rotation).
In the US, when they occur in cities or urban scenes, they are typically called "Nevada tornadoes" or "Chicago tornadoes" because of Chicago's reputation for wind, despite dust devils being rare in Chicago.
Read more about this topic: Dust Devil
Famous quotes containing the word names:
“And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think. And so on for all the other things which made merry with my senses. Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“I introduced her to Elena, and in that life-quickening atmosphere of a big railway station where everything is something trembling on the brink of something else, thus to be clutched and cherished, the exchange of a few words was enough to enable two totally dissimilar women to start calling each other by their pet names the very next time they met.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity—their links with their dead and the unborn.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)