Given that they occur at the same time, it doesn’t matter how you say it. The reason you hear the thunder later then you see the lightning comes down to light traveling (186,000mi/sec) alot faster then the sound does.

If you’ve ever been right under a thunderstorm you’d see and hear little to no delay at all.

We do it because in the German language, whence we get the expression, saying thunder first rolls off the tongue nicely: donner und blitzen.

Mark: true, true, but that’s no fun!

Ed: Wow, huh! And hail storms are known as Rudolph?

Smart aleck!

Hail storm is hagel-schauer (pronounced "hoggle shower"). While the words "hagel" and "hail", or "thunder" and "donner", are clearly similar in germanic phonemes, we never adopted the "blitzen."

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