‘Rainmaker.” What is it? Who is it? Can we use it in a sentence? Well, as a nod to etymological giant William Safire, the term “rainmaker” came into the common lexicon in the mid-to-late 18th century, just prior to legal marketers’ appropriation of the word, when people in the Western United States actually tried to produce rain. Drought, apparently, gets people thinking big.
How does rainmaking work? Well, there is cloud seeding, whereby an airplane releases substances into the air to manipulate cloud structure and increase precipitation. The U.S. military employed such operations during the Vietnam War to challenge the enemy’s progress, and the method is still in use today. There is also rain dancing, a slightly less scientific, but no less earnest, approach to climate change, commonly associated with Native American dance and prayer rituals.
