Things that fall out of the sky

One day, I asked my Finnish teacher if it was true that her language had 30 different words for snow. She fixed me with her big, blinky eyes.

"No, you poor deluded fool," she sighed. "We Finns only have one word for ‘snow’. The trouble is, you English think that everything white that falls out of the sky is ‘snow’."

Jonathan Clements, Schoolgirl Milky Crisis

Similarly that cold wet stuff falling out of the sky right now cannot be rain, because the forecast told us that it would not rain north of Middlesbrough.

(I think I'd have noticed if they'd moved Middlesbrough.)