I fought the urge all through July. It was surely coming, it does every July, sometimes even as early as June. “Meteorologists” and tired headline writers continued to abuse the English language in their collective quest to tell listeners and readers about the monsoon season.
But I was hit with a quadruple whammy in about 12 hours. For what was probably the 30th evening, I listened to a “meteorologist” on an Albuquerque news station talk about the monsoons continuing, then read in a daily newspaper about the threat of more monsoons today and a news reader on NPR (oh, no, not you too!) Monday morning told me to be on the look out for more monsoon rain.
The straw was reading a quote from a teacher with a PhD who spoke of the monsoons in New Mexico. The former meteorologist and editor in me both threw up their arms and cried for a correction.
The same day I began writing this column a very intelligent woman doing research on the effects of drought on native bees said, “We need the monsoons.”
Aaaaaaargh.
Just as we continue to purposely misuse the terms farolito and luminara(o), wordsmiths and talking heads must tell us about monsoons, when we live in a desert with average annual rainfall of 13 inches.
There is no argument here. Those misusing the word monsoon have no legs to stand on. They are legless.
From Webster’s dictionary:
(A monsoon is) a seasonal prevailing wind in the region of South and Southeast Asia, blowing from the southwest between May and September and bringing rain (the wet monsoon ), or from the northeast between October and April (the dry monsoon ).
It is a wind. It is only experienced in south and southeast Asia.
I tolerate some “professional’s” use of the word in adverb form as in: the monsoonal flow, but that too is not accurate.
When monsoon season kicks in this time of year, areas such as Sri Lanka, India, Myanmar and Thailand get hammered. It rains nonstop for days, weeks. It’s not uncommon for these areas to receive 10 inches of rain in 24 hours. We’re going to be hard-pressed to reach that in all of 2018.
What we experience here is a relative increase in atmospheric moisture that allows the heat of the day or a mild upper air disturbance to create thunderstorms, which may last an hour. And yes some can be large, such as the 1,000 year flood that clobbered Santa Fe two weeks ago.
Side note: 1,000 year flood is another inaccurate, misused phrase. We don’t know something is a 1,000 year flood until we record climatology for 1,000 years.
One other aspect of the misuse by communicators of the word monsoon that bothers me even more is that the word monsoon is becoming like the word ain’t. So many people are misusing it, a majority feel it’s fine to continue to misuse it to describe our summer weather pattern. In short, it’s OK to use a word incorrectly, as long as most of us agree to it.
Anarchy is coming. Pretty soon blue will be green, night will be day and cats will be sleeping with dogs. Just because a bulk of the population is not educated to the proper use of a word, does not mean we lower the standard. We must bring them along and teach them a word’s proper meaning.
To do this media must stop misusing it. They contribute to the fake media term when they use words inaccurately and consistently, encouraging listeners and readers to do the same.
Otherwise we may just as well climb back up in the trees, and hope the monsoons don’t soak us.