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Science Diction

Hurricane

Science Diction

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Friday, Society & Culture, Science, Origin, Culture, Words, History, Word, Language

4.8 • 610 Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2021

⏱️ 23 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

CORRECTION: In this episode, we say that there were only two names left on the 2021 list of Atlantic hurricane names until we resume use of the Greek alphabet letters. In March 2021, the World Meteorological Association decided to end the use of the Greek alphabet, and provided a list of supplementary names instead.   This episode is a re-broadcast. It originally aired in November 2020.  Every year, the World Meteorological Organization puts out a list of 21 names for the season’s hurricanes and tropical storms. But in 2020, the Atlantic hurricane season was so active that by September, we'd flown through the whole list of names and had to switch to the Greek alphabet. Thus, Hurricane Iota became the 30th named storm of the season. We’ve only had to dip into the Greek alphabet once before, in 2005. But the practice of naming hurricanes goes back to the 19th century, and it was a bumpy ride to land on the system we use today. In this episode: The story of a meteorologist in Australia, a novel, and a second-wave feminist from Florida—and how they brought us hurricane names. Guests: Christina M. Gonzalez is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.Liz Skilton is a historian and the author of Tempest: Hurricane Naming and American Culture. Footnotes & Further Reading: For more hurricane history, check out A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America's Hurricanes by Eric Jay Dolin. To learn more about Roxcy Bolton and the fight to change the naming system, read Liz Skilton’s article “Gendering Natural Disaster: The Battle Over Female Hurricane Names.” Credits: Science Diction is hosted and produced by Johanna Mayer. Our editor and Senior Producer is Elah Feder. We had story editing from Nathan Tobey, and fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our composer is Daniel Peterschmidt. Chris Wood did sound design and mastered the episode. Special thanks to the Florida State Library & Archives for allowing us use footage from Roxcy Bolton’s oral history interview. Nadja Oertelt is our Chief Content Officer.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi, my name is Kat and I am seven years old. I live in Philadelphia and I wanted to know where the name

0:09.0

Hurricane comes from. Since we got hit with floods and tons of rain by a tornado, I mean a hurricane.

0:20.0

So I was wondering if you could put that on your broadcast

0:25.2

and tell me, please. That was really good, Kai. This is Dad here. Thanks so much.

0:32.2

Thank you, Kai. And Kai's dad. We actually made an episode about this last year, about not just the word hurricane,

0:40.9

but also why we give Storm's names, like Ida or Peter, and not just Hurricane

0:48.3

Number 7 or whatever.

0:51.3

So just for you, Kai, we're going to play it again.

0:55.5

This episode originally aired in 2020, which was a particularly weird year for hurricane names.

1:02.6

And just one quick thing before we get started, you're going to hear me use the words

1:07.0

hurricane, typhoon, and cyclone pretty much interchangeably. They're all the same weather

1:12.7

system, but we just have different names for them depending on where they occur. So in some parts

1:18.6

of the world, they call them cyclones, and other parts are called typhoons, which, by the way,

1:24.1

that word likely comes from the Chinese taifung,

1:29.8

which basically means big or great wind.

1:34.3

And when it happens in the Atlantic, near us, it's called a hurricane.

1:38.4

So same weather system, different parts of the world.

1:41.6

Okay, here we go.

1:48.8

Leave it to 2020, to put us in a weird weather situation.

1:52.6

We ran out of hurricane names.

1:54.4

Well, kind of.

2:02.3

So every year, the World Meteorological Organization puts out a list of 21 hurricane names in alphabetical order.

...

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