A storm by any other name

Want to know who to blame for this long winter of endless snow and stubborn ice?

Ask Shakespeare.

“T’is but thy name that is my enemy,” he wrote.

Hear that weather channel?

It’s the name.

Anonymous snowstorms build quietly, whoosh swiftly through town and move on. The entire event rarely lasts more than a day, a quick sound bite on the local news.

Name a simple snowstorm and it gets cocky, hangs around a little too long, all bluster and blow. Track it in Twitter trending Technicolor and it really takes off, hires an agent, marries a Kardashian.

We can’t be the only one who have noticed the irritating correlation between named storms and mounding snow banks. Look at what happened to Nemo, a harmless flake of a weather pattern until it wandered into the view finder of the marketing wizards at TWC. Suddenly, it became NEMO, which actually means “nobody” in Latin. Nobody became somebody long about Nebraska and, by the time he screamed into New Jersey he was an uncontrollable brute.

We vow by the strained metal of our twice broken shovel that it’s time to stop. No more elevating boring entities to celebrity in this country.

Let’s start with the snow.