SLOW

With the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans being ravaged by some nasty storms, I got to wondering about the differences between hurricanes and typhoons. Why are they given different names, when it looks like they are pretty much similar?

A quick glance into my dictionary last night told me that when this type of storm happens in the Pacific it's called a typhoon and if it happens in the Atlantic it's called a hurricane. Fine. But why the different words? Which word came first? Are the words timeless, could they have survived the ages?

It looks like hurricane is preferred for Atlantic storms, because it stems from the Taino word, hura, meaning wind. There is a strange corrolation with the Afrikaans word, herfs, and the Dutch word, herfst, which means autumn, the usual season for hurricanes and typhoons.

Typhoon also has an interesting etymology, since it comes primarily from the Greek word tuphon, meaning whirlwind, which somehow found its way into Cantonese: taaîfung, which means great wind.

Of course this is not the kind of thing you worry about when the storm is raging, but I just wanted to weigh up the different words. Both seem vicious and apt for the different regions. So will we ever see a Hurricane Slow? I somehow don't think so.

# posted by Slow @ 9:54 am