EDITORIAL (GlossyNews) — Meteorologists, or Weather Forecasters as they like to refer to themselves, have always found it hard to keep their audiences happy. If they call for sunshine and it rains, the first people blamed are the forecasters. For meteorologists, predicting some really foul weather and getting people to prepare for the worst — only to realize they had it all wrong — is a nightmare of gruesome proportions: the kind of nightmare that still jolts former FEMA head Mike Brown from nocturnal visions of prancing Arabian horses. The ugly viewer comments after the issuance of an all-clear are enough to make the sturdiest weather forecasters fall to their knees and pray to God for a disaster to strike.
To overcompensate for this, many meteorologists have devised a way to take the focus off their oftentimes erroneous forecasts and put it where it belongs: not on the weather itself but on the manner in which it’s described.
For instance, a line of vicious weather recently made its way across the upper portion of the United States. From blizzard-like conditions in North Dakota to hail, lightening and tornadoes in the upper Midwest, all hell was supposedly breaking loose — some hit, some miss. Just defining these storms as blizzards or tornadoes wasn’t enough to keep the viewers glued to their television sets. Audiences, as we know, need more. So meteorologists came up with a new lexicon of more graphic, more compelling weather terms. Examples include describing the strong tornadic activity in Chicago as a Chiclone (Chicago and cyclone combined) and Windpocalypse (an obvious attempt to cash in on the recent fad of naming anything and everything an End Times event).
This got me to thinking. Maybe some of these forecasters would pay good money if I came up with some really clever new words to describe serious weather events to take their viewers’ minds off the fact that the weather never really materialized as prophesied. Here are my suggestions:
Miaminami – A tsunami that is forecast to hit the Miami area after a Cuban earthquake.
Californishaker – A California earthquake.
Windemic – A better way to describe wind in Chicago than Windapocalypse.
Hurriupandgetitoverwith – A slow-moving hurricane.
Lousinundation – A breach of levees in New Orleans after a hurriupandgetitoverwith.
Mizzard – A miserable Minnesota blizzard.
Whizzard – A rare Kansas blizzard. Not to be confused with a ranking officer in an exclusive ethnic club.
Excitning – A long-lasting electrical storm that includes cloud-to-ground lightning as well as cloud-to-cloud lightning, which produces ooh’s and ahh’s from those watching the light show.
Then again, maybe I’m in the wrong business. I should be selling home insurance.