Derecho

[Slava]

Day-RAY-cho. The opposite, more or less, of a tornado.

Tornado = twisted wind, more or less.
Derecho = straight wind, which can cause a lot of damage, but not perhaps as much as a tornado. It's in the forecast for my region tonight, without an explanation. I guess we're supposed to know this one already. Do you?

[Perry Lassiter]

Spanish word for derecho, right as in la mano derecho, right hand. Anti-cyclone?

[Philip Hudson]

Perry:
Shouldn't it be "el mano derecho"? Actually, the aspects of this Spanish expression have got me dumbfounded. The following may un-confuse you, but it still leaves me shaking my head in confusion.

http://spanish.about.com/od/spanishvoca ... erecho.htm

In Tex-Mex, "to the right " is simply "el recho".

There is certainly room in Spanish for Derecho to mean directly, or in a straight line. I assume we borrowed this for Derecho winds.

Early in my life I never heard the word tornado. We always said cyclone for anything as small as a dust devil to the concrete highway eating mega-tornado to hurricanes.

We have experienced a lot of derechos in the USA this year. I have experienced them many times. When a boiling wall of dust approaches the lone horseman on the prairie, he had better seek cover. I have been out and unprotected in seventy mph derechos with dust so black I couldn't "see my hand in front of my face." "Nature, like us, is sometimes caught without her diadem." Emily Dickinson.

[Perry Lassiter]

I was taught that mano was the only Spanish noun ending in o that was feminine, thus la mano. Also explains my confusion about derecho, since Spanish adjectives agree in gender with their nouns. So on the right hand,would translate a la mano derecha. Still, I wonder, because usually Spanish adjectives are available in either gender.

I also had trouble with cyclone. I remember Dorothy's Kansas house was hit by a cyclone, and I puzzled why it wasn't a tornado. Later I found that to weather people a cyclone is a clockwise weather pattern, often covering many states. Thus anticyclones would be the similar pattern in reverse direction, i.e. anticlockwise.