Monday, February 16, 2015

What's In A Name?


The snow in the Northeast this winter has been overwhelming.  Simply watching it on TV from the sofa in my warm Florida home brings tears to my eyes.  It's devastating.  Strangely, however, I've become hooked on The Weather Channel.  Watching all that snow fall at any hour of the day is my latest pastime.  But what's up with those names that the storms have now?

I've always been fascinated by names.  Maybe this is because my siblings and I are a product of our parents odd naming system.  My parents wanted to name my oldest sister Linda but chose Susan instead.  They thought too many girls would be named Linda at the time.  Susan isn't exactly what I would call an uncommon name, but hey, whatever works.  Eight years and three children later, they must have become weary of naming children.  I ended up with the recycled name, Linda.

Do you know that Linda was the number one girls name of the 1950's and has never made the list since?  Everywhere I go there is at least two more Lindas.  In my working days, I had an office right next door to another Linda.  People would stand outside our doors and say "Good morning, Linda,"  killing two birds with one stone. I met four Lindas at Weight Watchers. Once I was in a meeting with five Lindas.  Trying to keep us all straight was impossible.  I don't think my sister Susan, is suffering the same fate.

Being a Floridian, I'm familiar with naming hurricanes.  On June 1st of each year, the start of hurricane season, the current year's names are headline news.  The National Weather Services is in charge of the names and retires names that meet certain criteria for a level of storm induced devastation.  When The Weather Channel started calling each new blizzard by name, I was curious where these monikers had come from. 

To my surprise, TWC thought them up themselves starting in 2011.  The names are a lineup of who's who of Greek, Roman and Norse mythology, but not a god of snow in the bunch. The names, Hektor, Juno and Linus are among those on the list. Right now Neptune is pounding Boston just like the storms that have come before him.  And guess what! NOAA doesn't acknowledge the use of these names. It took the unsuspecting public a nanosecond to accept the term "Winter Storm Octavia "as a perfectly normal thing.

It used to be that winter storms were simply referred to as "The Blizzard of 1977" or "1985" or whatever year it happened to be.  I'll bet that it snowed more than once in those years blessed with "Blizzards".  When clearing out 20 foot piles of snow, is anyone really going to care whether it came from Marcus or Iola?  No. We'll only remember the winter of 2015.

A person's name is like gold, music to our ears every time we hear it. So for all the Hektors, Iolas and Octavias who love being told, "What an unusual name you have," you are about to join the same name club. As a Linda, I share my name with lots interesting and lovely women of a certain age, not a devastating hurricane or blizzard.  Or at least not yet.






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