David Astle's Wordplay: stormage brews over weather words
Hurricane or hurricane, asked Pip. Not the word as such, but how to say it. Was it hurri-cayne or hurri-cun? Big Bash callers prefer to emphasise the cane, maintaining their sport's own whackiness, whereas posher types insist the word half-rhymes with pelican. So which is it?
The rain in Spain falls mainly with the hurricane, as we know. We also know that most of us echo the American usage, opting for the cane-syllable, the Hobart Hurricanes included. Did the matter end there? As if.
Restless by nature, hurricanes continue to batter linguists all over the shop, quite apart from pronunciation. To quote a listener to ABC radio: "I take exception to the phrase 'hurricane-force winds'. Hurricane is not used in Australia to refer to severe tropical lows. We use the word cyclone."
Just ask Trevor last week. Or Veronica in the west. Or Oma in February, or Cyclone Debbie who razed Airlie Beach in 2017. Australia does a roaring trade in cyclones, according to the Met Bureau, yet the same agency favours hurricane when it comes to degrees of ferocity. Local boffins categorise wind warnings into strong, gale, storm force and lastly hurricane force (for cyclones).
Hurricane, the word, isn't listed in the bureau's glossary, while hurricane force is defined as winds averaging 64 knots or more in coastal waters and high seas areas. What sort of winds, you ask. To cite the Macquarie's entry on hurricane: "a violent tropical cyclonic storm of the NE Pacific and northern Atlantic."
If your brain's still reeling in a clockwise direction, spare a thought for Cape York locals in 1899. North of Cooktown, some 300 souls drowned in the jaws of the Bathurst Bay Hurricane, despite the fact we don't suffer hurricanes. Mind you, that catastrophe lay outside the statute of pedantic chatrooms, not to mention the purview of the bureau itself.
But the squall's not over, since readers are just as jumpy about the wet stuff. "For Godsakes," to paraphrase my inbox, "what happened to plain rain? Or good old-fashioned storms?" Thanks to new jargon, we now fall prey to rain events and stormage, as peddled by forecasters, despite neither term appearing in the BOM's lexicon.
Tiger Webb, custodian of the ABC's Style Guide, a handy online resource, waded into the debate, deeming "rain event to be meteorological jargon, and best avoided in place of more prosaic substitutes". Such as rain – remember that word? As for stormage, even Mr Paperclip thinks I mean storage.
"Everyone talks about the weather," said Mark Twain, "but nobody does anything about it." Times have changed since Twain's rain refrain however, and humans have been doing plenty to improve our weather patterns. But not enough, if you ask Connie, another climate correspondent:
"Is there a word for someone who's ashamed and/or distressed to be a member of the human species due to the scale of environmental destruction?" Be that surplus rain or its absence, say. Connie wanted a label for the feeling, something more than weltschmerz, the German word for world-pain, a sentimental pessimism.
The crux is anthropogenic – or what humanity has inflicted on isobars and temperature. To Connie I suggested millennihilism, yet both of us sensed the bid could be bettered. Cue Missy Higgins, the singer releasing an album in 2018, its title prompting most fans to dive for the dictionary.
Solastalgia was coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, the term fusing solacium (Greek for comfort) plus -algia (pain). Put simply, solastalgia is the melancholy caused by a significant change to one's local environment, whether that's weather, a fracking mine or a drift of dead Menindee fish. Then we have the muddle of humidity versus relative humidity, but I feel we've all weathered enough.
For Godsakes, what happened to plain rain?
davidastle.com
Twitter @dontattempt