What exactly is “windblown town”?I can’t find a definition for “windblown” in this context. I always thought of it as a deserted town.
All the definition I find online for windblown give me:
(of trees, shrubs, etc.) growing in a shape determined by the prevailing winds
NZ (of trees) felled by the wind
3.Similar:
crooked (having or marked by bends or angles; not straight or aligned)
4.(of a hair style) bobbed short, with the ends combed toward the forehead.
Merriam Webster also gives “made messy by the wind.”
Without the full context it’s a little hard to say, but it’s probably being used figuratively to give a sense of a desolate town with the wind blowing though its streets, perhaps with old newspapers and trash blowing about.
It’s a town where a prominent climactic condition is lots of wind. Another way to express it is that the wind always seems to be blowing. Typically such towns don’t have many (or any) tall buildings that would block the wind.
Metaphorically my minds eye image of a “windblown town” is one that is small, sparsely populated, not doing well economically, and subject to a somewhat harsh environment wind, desert, etc.
Actually, tall buildings create wind. Between thermal conduction and plain old funnel effect (any breeze is forced to the spaces between the buildings). the high-rise section of town is often the gustiest.
I’m wondering this, too, because I just did a quick corpus search in COCA and it’s actually not a very common collocation. Most frequent collocations in fiction are windblown hair, sand, snow, dust, leaves, dirt, grass, but town isn’t in the top 100. There is a magazine description referring to Topeka as a windblown city; a reference (in NPR) that “Garcia Marquez’s home village of Aracataca, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, has become a ghost town, a necropolis as windblown and haunted as any gold rush ruin”*; and in Field and Stream: “the windblown desert town of Hot Springs.”
In general it seems to be used just to mean either “exposed to wind” or “tossed around by wind.”
*Having been there I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly windy place, as it’s not that close to the coast, so this could be used more to convey that it’s isolated or abandoned.
I think astro’s and guizot’s definitions come pretty close to the mark. I’ve come across the description “windblown” to describe a place quite often. It was only after looking up an actual definition for “windblown” that I discovered that there was no definition describing a “windblown town”. That surprised me. Hence my question. Thanks everyone.Very helpful.
astro: “Metaphorically my minds eye image of a “windblown town” is one that is small, sparsely populated, not doing well economically, and subject to a somewhat harsh environment wind, desert, etc.”
guizot…“this could be used more to convey that it’s isolated or abandoned.”
Or possibly ‘windswept’ - that sounds more familiar a descriptor to my (British) ears, and would suggest that an area is open to the elements, remote and (most importantly) windy.
Go to Google maps and find the area of Texas between Big Spring, Lubbock, and Odessa. Drop further down and pick any of the little places like Monahans, Stanton, O’Donnell, etc. Stroll around there for awhile. That’s windblown. It’s prairie sand and no trees and no rain. Add the wind and sand is everywhere. It piles up in corners, it pushes through your closed windows. Then there’s the sand storm. Just stay inside.
