Frank and Ernest by Thaves for August 23, 2012

SNERK!!!

Hey no profiling! LOL

Okay, I’ll admit I laughed at this one. Really quite clever. I hadn’t considered that before. Props to this. :)

What about speakers of Romance languages? Germanic and Slavic languages have masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns, but in Romance languages, every single inanimate object is either a he or a she :)

Hahahaha! Love it.

Excellent answer! Give this boy an A+!

Does that mean “Narrow minded” is masculine?

+++++

On a more serious note, many languages do assign genders to nouns (and their adjectives), but that is not necessarily linked to the gender of the designated object. Is a table feminine? Is a spirit feminine, neuter, or masculine?

The Chinook-what the American Indians called the cold spell right before spring.

Clever and gave me a good laugh.

Originally they were given names like “The Great Galveston Storm of 1900” or the " ’26 Hurricane of Miami"

In WWII with the military doing the weather recconnaissance over the oceans, the hurricanes (typhoons in the Pacific) were named using the military “radio” alphabet (pre-NATO version): Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Fox…etc. (The eye of 1950’s hurricane King passed over over our house)

Then the Weather Bureau started using feminine names. When someone asked “Why not male names?”, a bright kid answered “Because they aren’t ‘hisacanes’” (Sounds like something Calvin might say). Finallly, the weather services around the Atlantic settled on a mix of male and female names.

A more historic reason for the female names: they were named ad hoc by the Weather Bureau people, who used their girlfriends names. This got regularized to have lists of female names running through the alphabet—I think they now have about 5 or 6 lists.

bmonk: Not according to Oscar Hammerstein II: “Where she’s narrow she is narrow as an arrow, and she’s broad where a broad should be bro-a-a-a-a-ad.” Honey Bun, South Pacific.

I’ve heard (probably urban legend) that hurricanes got female names because they kept changing course.

Saucy1121: No, bmonk was closer (although it was not girl friends, but that they were, after all, HERricanes). Now we have HISsicanes as well (and about time). There are five lists which are repeated in a cycle, but particularly destructive ones are retired and new names added to the lists to replace them. Also, now tropical storms (c. 60-75 knot) cyclonic winds are named as true hurricanes, since before, the list was only run a third through. English, Spanish, and French names are used. (What, no Dutch? After all, there are Aruba, Bellaire, Curaçao, Surinam, and Saant Martin.)

About the same time as hissicanes came on the scene typhoons in the eastern Pacific got called hurricanes too. Western Pacific ones occur year ’round and so the lists run consecutively and a whole pile of languages are used. In both cases, some letters are skipped for lack of enough names.