A name for the wind

Original non-fiction-style practice text.

During the island walk, the guide used a local word for the wind which arrived from the narrow channel. I wrote it down and asked her to translate it. She offered the phrase cold wind, then shook her head. That conveyed its temperature, but not everything the name meant to people who lived there.

The wind usually reached their houses before the rough weather appeared offshore. Hearing the word could therefore prompt someone to bring washing inside or check a boat's mooring. Visitors who knew only the temperature might put on another layer and continue their walk. The guide did not claim the name was a perfect forecast. She said it carried a habit of attention which two English words left unexplained.

I added a sentence beneath the translation in my notebook. The word had become harder to fit into a tidy vocabulary list. It had also become more useful. I could now understand why a conversation about apparently ordinary weather had sent one woman back towards her garden gate.

Use your own words to explain “a habit of attention” in the second paragraph.