Rain, Again

Il pleuve. Llueve. It is raining. Weather often isn't anybody's fault, unless you count Greek peasants who believe the Earth is Zeus' toilet bowl. Weather doesn't have an agent (look at how people complain about it!) and often has no patient either, provided you don't run around in thunderstorms with a kite. Since the weather is an event without mover or moved, languages with mind-boggling conjugations often have only a few forms in the third person singular (he/she/it) for “it rains”. I've even heard that a few languages forgo a verbal form of 'rain' and leave only a noun – it would not surprise me if such languages demanded a subject for their sentences, the reverse of the court of an unjust king. Under normal circumstances, rain falls from the sky to the ground, so the sentence “Rain comes down” does not appear strange.

In ancient times, these forms made sense; weather happened. If certain weather was predictable according to the season, that did not indicate any understanding of the cause. Even today, the weather forecast is shockingly uncertain compared to the “stricter” sciences. Has the greater understanding of the interaction of humus clouds and human crowds brought us to a point where the tempestuous agents of human nature ought to be acknowledged, in speech as well as thought? I'm not claiming some strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which for me is more a tool of creation than dissection, but if people in uncomfortable positions use the passive (“mistakes were made”) to eliminate personal responsibility, why not use the reverse to promote responsibility?