An addendum to my last post: Today my language helper asked me if I'd seen the snow the other night. She asked the question in Arabic, except for that one all-important word, and that she said in English: "snow". I laughed a little, especially remembering my own wishful comparisons, and tried to explain the difference. The problem is that there's only word in the local Arabic. The word telg refers to any frozen water (and maybe other frozen liquids too; I'm not sure), no matter if it's hail falling from the sky or frost clogging up the freezer. So snow (and presumably sleet and freezing rain and other such fun gifts of an Oklahoma winter) is also telg. And since almost no one here has ever seen snow, and my Arabic isn't quite up to elaborations on the crystalline structure of frozen H₂O or meteorological lectures on the formation of such precipitation, about the most mutual understanding that was achieved, I think, is that pieces of snow are much, much smaller than pieces of hail.