The NY Times has noted that the World Meteorological Organization will no longer use Greek letters to name the 27th and subsequent hurricanes. They note:
National Weather Service officials said the Greek alphabet got in the way of the main reason for naming storms — to help the public readily identify and track them. Many people were confused by the sounds of the Greek letters, and public attention often focused more on the use of the alphabet itself than on the destruction caused by the storms, officials said. “Zeta, Eta, Theta — if you think about even me saying those — to have those storms at the same time was tough,” said ...., the director of the National Hurricane Center, pointing to three Greek letters that were used in rapid succession to name three of the last storms of the season. “People were mixing the storms up.”
Now being my age, we studied Latin, Greek, French, and even Italian and Spanish. Italian so we go to the Italian priest for Confession, much more understanding, and Spanish since my father had us learn at home and well in NYC it was a second language.
But why Greek? Simple, it introduced one to a second alphabet, and Greek has a way of saying things not like English. English is not like French, and the list goes on. Frankly English is one of the more difficult languages since it is a mixture of many polyglot peoples. A cab driver in Bangkok can use it as well as a bar in Moscow. Not a nice language but it works.
So people mix storms up, try the COVID variants. is is 1.1.7 not 117. Think about it. They are just names. But way powerful names. Understanding Greek means we get to see our world in another dimension. I knew enough when I worked in Athens that after a few months the Greek words became familiar, they were in English, albeit a slightly different alphabet.
So I guess it is easier if I call a storm Deidre rather than Delta, or whatever.
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