Blizzard

[cos]

"Blizzard" is a perfectly fine word that could serve us well for centuries. I wish we weren't calling every run-of-the-mill blizzard a "snowpocalypse".

True, it is a fun word. If we'd had it in '78 it would've come in handy. We made do with "blizzard" then.

Comments

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

It's just linguistic inflation. We've got a lot of it going on. Awesome no longer involves much awe, Epic events do not require the composition of multi-hour bardic narratives, and Wars are administrative proceedings against social phenomena the government has decided are bad, as opposed to trying to keep another country from stealing hunks of real estate by blowing pieces off of every available able-bodied male. As the actual amount of drama in average human lives decreases, we make things sound more exciting than they are so that the stuff that is going on seems important.

[feuervogel]

As it says in my profile, Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obligated to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alertly as we pretend. -- EM Forster, A Passage to India