Much damage has been caused by the two most recent feminine attacks on the United States, Katrina and Rita. Knowing little as I did some five minutes ago, I was enraged by the choice of names. I intended to write something about this issue in particular back when Katrina was the hottest news icon.

I could not see any reason for giving such a natural disaster a feminine name. I pondered upon the matter and decided it must have been chosen randomly. But once Rita lashed American coasts and being named as she was, some vision of a conspiracy theory started to weave itself in my head. Finally managing to prepare my case and present it to you, I resolved to search the matter first. I googled naming of hurricanes, and Lo and Behold I found many sites dealing with the issue.

The result that I was most interested in came from this site, and it featured an article titled Hurricane Center may run out of names by Ker Than. Grippingly, it turns out that feminists urged the WMO to add men’s names, which was done in 1979. The boy-girl-boy-girl naming convention evolved to include French and Spanish names in the Atlantic system, reflecting the languages of the nations affected by Carribean hurricanes.”
That indicated the collapse of my case concerning Katrina and Rita. I was nonetheless pleased to learn that male names were also chosen for such demonstrations of natural devastation; after all, we are equal for better and for worse.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 27th, 2005 at 12:44 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.