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How did hurricanes get their names?
It’s a long and interesting story.
As Eric Jay Dolin reports in his book A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes, there were no standard naming protocols prior to the middle of the 20th century.
Storms were often tagged with the particular year and place where they came ashore. Thus we have the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 and the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. The word “great” appears a lot in the records, and seems to express, in a single word, “this was one whale of a storm which you can thank your lucky stars you never had to experience.”
Sometimes officials named hurricanes after the Catholic saint on whose day it made landfall. Occasionally a living person received this quasi-honor. When a violent storm hit Florida while President Truman was visiting, it became Harry’s Hurricane. The next storm was promptly dubbed Hurricane Bess, after his wife. Presidential families remain grateful this trend never really got traction.
Dolin points out that a single eccentric individual did more than anyone else to turn hurricane nomenclature into an art form.
In the 1890s, Clement Lindley Wragge, the chief weather forecaster in Queensland, Australia – a tall, thin man with “a mop of flaming red hair” – delighted in naming Pacific typhoons after Roman gods and goddesses. When local politicians denounced his imperious manner, Wragge got revenge by naming a handful of major storms after them.
Eventually he settled on women’s names – something that did not go unnoticed in the United States.
For years, American meteorologists had been identifying powerful Atlantic storms using the classic Army-Navy phonetic system of Alpha, Bravo, Charlie. Beginning in 1953, they followed Wragge’s lead in associating particular hurricanes with females. Storms, after all – just like individuals – have their own personalities and characteristics.
Unsurprisingly, the result was a storm of protest.
Women were not overly happy to be associated with tragedy and loss.
Journalists had a field day describing particular storms as witches, temperamental “bad girls,” mothers-to-be in the midst of labor pains, or jilted lovers bent on revenge.
In the late 1950s, Roxcy Bolton, a key figure in Florida’s feminist movement, sent a cease-and-desist order to NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Since U.S. senators enjoy having their names attached to highways, airports, and such, why not honor them with the occasional catastrophic weather event? Bolton imagined headlines like “Barry Goldwater Destroys Louisiana,” or “Jacob Javits Wipes Out New York.”
More than 20 years later, prompted by Secretary of Commerce Juanita Kreps, government forecasters finally opted for gender equality. The second hurricane of 1979 was named Bob.
Since then, storm names have alternated between males and females. Six lists, each containing 21 names, are used in rotation. The names of unusually costly or deadly hurricanes are permanently retired. So far there are 99 entries on that list, including Beryl, Helene, and Milton from 2024.
Names were a big deal in Bible times.
They were widely assumed to describe a person’s identity, character, and destiny.
Some children were blessed with pick-me-up names like Naomi (“beautiful, agreeable”) or Amoz (“strong, robust”). Others were saddled with crippling monikers like Barabbas (“son of shame”) or Mephibosheth, (“out of my mouth proceeds reproach”). Mom and Dad, what were you thinking?
The Name Game hits a lot closer to home when we grasp how often we identify ourselves with some kind of hidden personal descriptor – a dark name we would never actually speak out loud. Perhaps you secretly know yourself as Clumsy, A Disappointment to My Father, or Too Afraid to Try Again.
Or you can go with one of the names that someone else – perhaps a parent or an ex or a boss or a bully – hung on you somewhere along the way: Loser, Zit-Face, Wannabe. You cringe every time you look at what certain reckless people have chosen to call you on social media.
It matters what name we bear.
You can make the best of the name on your birth certificate. Or you can go with what other people call you.
Or you can conclude that God alone knows who you really are, and has the right to declare your identity, character, and destiny. You can claim as your own the names that God has graciously bestowed on every Christian in Ephesians 1:3-14. There are seven of them – one for every day of the week. If you’ve enrolled as a follower of Jesus, here is a seven-fold expression of your true identity:
Blessed
Redeemed
Forgiven
Included
Sealed (by the Holy Spirit)
Predestined (for adoption into God’s family)
Chosen (before the creation of the world)
Whatever name you decide to answer to will almost certainly determine the shape of your life.
Choose wisely.
Personally, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that NOAA will never have to put out bulletins concerning Hurricane Glenn.