WIND CHILL FACTOR

 

Life is full of surprises and woes, and uncertainty rules us all, of course. And even though I sing the praises of being bilingual, I shroud the bitter truth and sugar the pill in order to hide the truth of being a true master of two languages. The fact is that we must be able to express even trivial expressions in both languages. The case in point right now is the wind chill factor. We may have a temperature of  5 degrees Celsius but because of the wind chill factor, we feel the temperature to be 0 degrees. And I tend to forget that in Spanish it is "sensación térmica". "Tenemos una temperatura de 8 grados pero la sensación térmica es de 3 grados." This is certainly trivial, but very important when we are talking about the weather. The labors of the bilingual speaker are similar to those of Sisyphus (Google it!).