weather war
n.— «In the States, they have a name for the media’s increasingly demented obsession with meteorological phenomena: “weather wars.” Anyone who has watched a US reporter narrowly avoid being blown off a rain-lashed balcony in the course of noting that there might be a tornado on the way will know that it’s more than rough out there: it’s a veritable arms race. Forget good men and women risking life and limb that viewers may know storms are a’coming; these turns are backed up with hardware marginally less expensive than the star wars programme. Up and down the Gulf coast and across the great plain stations now actually run attack ads on each other’s forecasting capabilities.» —“Comment is free: Tonight a climate of fear will be sweeping in from the west” by Marina Hyde Guardian (United Kingdom) Feb. 10, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
After our conversation about the expression dingle day, a term used by workers at a research station in Antarctica to denote bright, sunny weather, a listener offers a possible explanation for this term. It may derive from the idea of the skies...
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people disagreed over the best word to use when answering the phone. Alexander Graham Bell suggested answering with ahoy! but Thomas Edison was partial to hello! A fascinating new book about...