the.com/ash cloud
A volcano's way of grounding every flight to remind you who's in charge.
means A dense plume of pulverized rock and glass hurled into the atmosphere by a volcanic eruption, capable of drifting for thousands of miles and choking jet engines along the way.
from Straightforward compound of 'ash' — from Old English 'æsce,' the residue of burning, going back to a very old Germanic root for fire's leftovers — and 'cloud,' from Old English 'clud,' which originally meant a mass of rock or a hill before it drifted (fittingly) into meaning a mass of vapor in the sky. The phrase itself is modern and plainly descriptive, not ancient — it entered everyday vocabulary largely through 20th- and 21st-century news coverage of eruptions disrupting air travel, the words simply doing their literal jobs together.
- glass, not smoke
- made of tiny shards of rock and glass, not soot
- engine killer
- melts inside jet turbines then resolidifies as glass
- 2010 chaos
- Eyjafjallajokull grounded 100,000 flights across europe
- name problem
- nobody could pronounce the volcano that caused it