The Potential for a Potentially Potential Hurricane Season - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Potential for a Potentially Potential Hurricane Season

I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him.

None of his institutions control or pervade her.

-attributed to Henry David Thoreau

The buzzy words this hurricane season are the noun “potential” and its adverb “potentially.” In Latin “potential” means powerful; in modern English the meaning has drifted into a consideration of the possible. In Latin a potential storm is one that is powerful; in English a potential storm is not a storm at all but rather a weather disturbance that might become a storm.

We haven’t yet read a sentence such as “The potential hurricane is potentially heading for a potential landing on Florida’s cost,” but we might before the season is over. “Potential” is The Word; you are not going to see or hear the weather news this year without the speaker casting it about like pixie dust: “Potentially you are not going to potentially see or hear the potential weather news without the potential speaker casting it potentially about like potential pixie dust.”

Weather Underground (I don’t think they are really underground) came up with a fresh storm metaphor this year, “muscling,” as in “Hurricane Dorian is muscling its way to Florida.” That’s pretty good the first few hundred times you hear it.

Otherwise, the weather news is clotted with the same old metaphors about storms making landfall, brewing in the Gulf, building up steam, storming ashore (because, after all, storming is what storms do), lashing, pounding, barreling, reducing to rubble, battening down the hatches, wreaking havoc, leaving swaths of destruction, trees snapping like matchsticks, cars tossing around like toys, cities dodging the bullet, a street looking like a war zone, we’re not out of the woods, the eerie calm before the storm, the eerie calm in the eye of the storm, the eerie calm after the storm, perfect storm, storm of the century, in the crosshairs, fish storm, decimated, ground zero, and on and on.

Mother Nature’s Wrath and Mother Nature’s Fury used to be part of the babble, but no more. We have progressed from Greco-Roman mythology about nature goddess to Renaissance obsessions with witches. Someone must be blamed for hurricanes, and now the fault is beastly climate-change deniers instead of goddesses.

Climate-change deniers? Really?

As Henry David Thoreau said, “The wind that blows is all that anyone knows.”

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