In 1916, an article was published in the journal Journal of Agricultural Research that might help us correct a misleading and fairly common misconception about an important metaphor in Plato's works. The philosopher seems to have enjoyed situations (such as in the “Theaetetus” 210b) where Socrates, upon pointing out the obviously fruitless argument of an interlocutor, had to remark that the argument had no life in it, that it was a “wind-egg” (wind-egg).

Raymond Pearl and Maynie Curtis explain the original meaning of this term in their article “Studies on the Physiology of Reproduction in the Domestic Fowl”, and also mention less well-known variants such as “cock-egg”, “witch-egg”, and others. A wind-egg, contrary to what many might think, is not an empty egg with the white and yolk blown out through a small hole to decorate the fragile shell and place it on the mantelpiece without worrying about its expiry date. No, it is an “egg created by the wind”: the word “wind” denotes “egg” not in the sense that the egg itself is “windy”, but that it is “caused by the wind”; that is, the modifier here functions similarly to the phrase “sea glass”, rather than “milk chocolate”.

To be precise, a wind-egg usually occurs in spring, at nature’s most fertile moments, when Zephyrus (one of the four ἄνεμοι, or wind gods, each corresponding to a cardinal direction) comes out of his cave and kicks up a light breeze, making buds swell and meadows turn green. Quite inevitably, some of this wind enters the hens' reproductive system, where it helps create what a rooster usually helps create. But since the wind is not a rooster, it can only give birth to an empty, shapeless creature, not a small chick that resembles the hen itself in form and species. Pliny the Elder, in turn, relates that this same wind is also to blame for “wind-colts”, which for several generations were born on the banks of the Tagus river in Portugal to mares that had never been covered. These little apparent horses could live for up to three years, but as they lacked at least half of the horse essence, they were never destined to amount to anything meaningful, much like the interlocutors of Socrates.

If I could, I would draw a true map of Europe, dividing it with a bold line into two vast regions: on one side, people live with the conviction that an airflow crossing a room through two open windows on opposite sides is dangerous and can kill or, at best, cause joint pain; on the other side, people feel there is nothing more invigorating and life-affirming than a draught. This line would roughly coincide with the border marked by the Protestant Reformation, which, again only roughly, also separates Germanic and Romance cultures. In Germany, tales of the so-called “föhn sickness” are not unknown: this refers to the warm wind that sometimes blows down Alpine slopes out of season, much like the Canadian “chinook”, which is famous for descending from the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains and melting the ice in Edmonton in mid-January.

However, nowadays Germans mostly mention the power of the föhn as a joke and are not afraid to let it into their homes in small doses, assigning the verbal form of this word, föhnen, to denote the function of an electric hairdryer. Yet, the further east and south one goes, the more menacing the draught becomes, which is why in Slavic and Orthodox regions it is often personified as something like a spirit or a supernatural being. In Russian, the airflow rushing through an open house is called сквозняк. The first part of the word, сквозь, is a preposition denoting movement “through”, while the suffix -няк is found in words like бедняк (poor person) and suggests that we are dealing with something human-like. Regardless of whether you are sitting in a block of flats in Ryazan or a wooden dacha in Karelia, if your son-in-law has opened the kitchen window to smoke in his undershirt, and your grandmother with a headscarf is beating a rug by the open balcony or front door, you will definitely hear your mother, watching a Brazilian soap opera on the sofa, quietly murmur: “Сквозняк,” or “The Draught-man,” – as if pointing to a specific villain who has sneaked into the room like a fox into a henhouse.
Article first published in the November 2021 issue of the magazine Rīgas Laiks