Bonus points if there’s a known onomatopoeia to describe the sound.
Static or Snow where I grew up in the US Southeast
Same!
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.
It’s χιόνι which means snow in Greece and we are not very cold.
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.
Flimmer
That’s cool. Something like “flickering”, I would guess?
Yeah, pretty much. It’s danish btw 🙂
It’s snow
We called it static.
Polish: śnieg (snow) or kasza/kaszka/kaszana (groats)
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
It’s just static.
In Spain it was “snow”.
Also in Italian, we used to call it “neve” (snow).
It’s “neige” which means “snow” in french
Brazil: chiado.
Or “chuviscado”, that could mean light rain.
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.
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.
Always called it “Ant races”
I’ve come to refer to it as static/snow but I specifically remember hearing it called ants/ant races as a child some 40 years ago. The husband of the elderly couple that took care of us base kids would insist he had a favorite and could tell if it was winning.
I get some strange comfort that it is called that by others and wasn’t some abstraction of my memory
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”.
Snow rain
… and sound was just called “hiss” or “white noise”
