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In this mid-June dawn in Fuengirola, with some clouds on the horizon and heat, we see in Las Fotos de los Lectores de La Vanguardia how dead calm has taken over the Mediterranean landscape.
The “dead calm” is defined as “the stillness of the air, especially at sea”. According to the Cervantes Virtual Center, created and maintained by the Instituto Cervantes, “talking about dead calm is talking about stillness.”
From the Greek word karma came the Latin word cauma, both meaning “suffocating heat.” According to the same source, “in the rising Castilian it was said calm, and in the slang of the sailors, the word was associated with the absence of wind, which made one feel scorching heat.” Then, people began to talk about “the calm sea”, when “nature did not give up the essential wind to navigate”.
As can be seen, “the calm voice denoted an undesirable situation, either due to the discomfort of the heat or due to the lack of wind”. However, “over time, its meaning softened until it took on the connotation of serenity, tranquility, peace.”
Regarding the origin of the “dead calm”, the Instituto Cervantes proposes the following:
It could be that, some day in the 18th century, on one of many voyages across the sea, the wind ceased and the ship stopped. The heat and the desperate stillness made a sailor of French origin exclaim something like “this is a chiche calm!” In French, chiche means “greedy”, so that the expression could be translated as “this is a greedy calm!”, this, for not yielding an iota of wind. The expression must have liked the Spanish sailors; The word “calm” had long since lost its harshness and they needed a new way of throwing nature’s “greed” in the face.
