That Bomb Cyclone is Gonna Open Up a Can of Whoop-Ass on the East Coast, Y'all!

It’s no surprise that those of us who love our pets and other animals tend to anthropomorphize, or project our human emotions, onto them. But storms? Come on.

Hurricane viewed from the International Space Station.

During the terrible 2017 hurricane season, many newspaper headlines described the “fury” or the “wrath” of a particular hurricane. “Menacing” “monster” storms “ravaged” human settlements. I kept waiting for some newspaper in the South to claim that a hurricane was gonna “open up a can of whoop-ass” on some poor coastal city, but the media never quite went that far. (So I’ve done it myself, in the above headline.)

And now we’re hearing about the “bomb cyclone.” According to Wednesday’s Washington Post, the bomb cyclone is quite a nasty human being. After it “blasts” the East Coast, it’s going to “punish” it, “assault” it, and “batter” it. East Coast people take note: you need to get a restraining order against that son of a bitch! Meanwhile the polar vortex is going to take it easy and do some uncorking. No, not of wine, silly. According to the article's headline, it’s going to “uncork tremendous cold.”

Hurricanes are natural phenomena that develop because of water temperatures and wind. They hit where they hit. They’re not particularly angry about anything. If anything, I would expect them to be happy that rising global temperatures may make better conditions for hurricanes. Why must we turn them into angry, vengeful human beings - even menacing estranged boyfriends on a mean streak after getting out of prison - in order to get the point across that they cause a great deal of damage and death and heartbreak?

Likewise, a bomb cyclone is simply a low-pressure storm that suddenly intensifies, causing high winds and winter weather. I lived in Boston for eleven years, and we were pretty darn used to icy temperatures and extreme snow. We used simple, descriptive names like “Nor’easter” to describe these storms, i.e. a blizzard that blows in from the Northeast. Oh, sure, we might have called the storm “wicked,” but that was not a judgment about the moral failings of an anthropomorphized storm. We used that term for a lot of things: wicked good pizza, a wicked fast car, and so on. Using the term “bomb cyclone” is not going to make the snow any easier or harder to shovel off the sidewalk.