Ocracoke is being evacuated now because it's accessible only by ferry and the evacuation time is the longest of any of the NC barrier islands.

Hurricane Bob

Hurricane Agnes

The Hurricane of '38

June, too soon;
July, 'tan by;
August, look out yu mus';
September, remember;
October, all over!

It isn't exactly accurate. The hurricane season runs from June to November.

June-too soon
July-stand by
August-in God we trust
September-remember
October-all over

I also remember her telling me June actually wasn't too soon, which sort of made me wonder why I was bothering to memorize the rhyme.

I remember, many years ago, reading of a vagrant January hurricane.

October - sure, in THEORY, but it never snows in October!

November - maaaaaaaybe, but it certainly doesn't snow before my birthday!

December - yeah, it can snow then

January - coooold cooold, no no please make the cold stop

February - maybe it will be warm this year and not snow!

March - it's never supposed to snow after my sister's birthday!

April - it can't snow after my brother's birthday, I'm sure!

May - WTF? Why is it snowing? Make winter stop!

Here, Halloween's a 50-50 shot (whether you get to see costumes or parkas and balaclavas), and there's always at least one big snowstorm after April. In fact, this year, there was a horrible storm (which I had to drive through) last weekend in May.

But we don't get hurricanes, earthquakes, or (more than one a year) tornadoes. I can live with snow.

Please stay safe, those that do.

* Although the practical lesson in how gullies are formed is one bit of geomorphology that's stuck with me.

Beats incompetent illegal advice ...

Similarly, I keep wondering why everyone's concerned about my older brother rampaging up and down the east coast. A tiny bit of mental whiplash at each headline.

Anybody else notice that each update, the path gets closer to land?

But this time we have moved here. Where we go so comes disasters. Sigh.

Love, C.

*same, slightly unusual, spelling, too

The hurricane months mnemonic is reminding me of the Paul Simon (?) lyrics to April... come she will...

Waiting to see when the storm shows up and working out what I'm going to do with the caged tomato plants if we're forecast for sustained winds over 20mph in this area. I suppose they'd fit in the basement.

Names: Back in college/grad school, my sister was nicknamed "Hurricane Rachel". Ironically, a hurricane crashed her wedding....

Slightly cross-threading, riffing on the theme of "times change" -- who else here remembers when ALL tropical storms and hurricanes had female names? And remember the HUGE foofaraw when the Weather Service first started using male names as well? You'd have thought the world was ending. And now it's just... normal.

Thank you for posting that link to the Hurricane Agnes flood. Back in 1972, at least for the Chemung River, they were calling it a 1,000 year flood. (Or, why I will *not* ever live in a flood plain. Ever. BT,DT, etc.)

My current Silicon Valley snow calendar expectations are "Snow lives in the mountains, and I can drive to it if I want, but it only snows down here on our low mountains every couple of years. Ski season is usually January-April." It should rain a couple of times in November and December, have serious rain in the winter, and get it over with by around April, but lately it's been weird and rained in May and even June.

Been There, Done That, Got a soggy, muddy T-Shirt?

In that book, they called the wind Maria.

Lee@26: I remember that, and the change. Seemed a tempest in a teapot to me; I saw no signs of the female-only names doing any harm, but it was clearly wrong, and the few objections I heard were all total nonsense. They should do a year of names used for both male and female, just to be weird (not sure they couild find them for all letters, though).

Fidelio@28: If there's a name for it, it's too obvious :-).

Jim Macdonald@34: I had no idea it was that recent, or had that clear an origin. Thanks!

Those are the ones I'm coming up with off the top of my head; I'll have to see if I can find my list of gender-neutral names...

Ah; or they could not say this is what they're doing, and just slip in a sex-specific name that fits a conceivable alternation for the holes they're left with. That would be more amusing in some ways.

Hayden

--

A boy called Evelyn? Never encountered that before.

No, wait, I did! Just never thought about it that way before. Thanks for the (unintentional) moment of enlightenment!

That only works really well while it's a tropical storm.

Filling in the gaps:
Haley?
Stanley is an alternative for S: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Dunham

Nothing for I, N, O, U-Z, I'm afraid.

41: there's a storm surge, what more do you want?

Haley,Hayden, or Hilary would do for H.

Vivian!
There are Italian men called "Nicola", and I think you can name a French boy "Nicole".

Still no joy on I, though; the best I've been able to dig up is "Ivory", and would you really name a boy Ivory?

I was thinking of Nicky for N
For I.. perhaps Izzy?

"Sandy" for males, not so popular. I attempted to use this to my advantage at age 18... they caught the error before I could actually move into an all-girl's dorm.

Nonetheless, it qualifies as gender-neutral.

My feelings are that if it's there, a determined thief will find it, given time to look. In that sense, there are no safe hiding places, really.

X, the unknown, could clearly be gender-neutral all by itself.

Whose first wife was also called Evelyn.

According to wikipedia, their friends called them "He-Evelyn" and "She-Evelyn."
According to wikipedia, it was an unhappy marriage.

Decent movie too, if I remember correctly Dean Jagger's one time as a film's leading sort-of-Quatermass character.

Vic would work, as it can be short for either Victor or Victoria.

I couldn't find one starting with X that sounded like a plausible English-language name. There are probably some Chinese names that could work.

and which
you were probably
hoping
would leave

Forgive me
they were depressed
so uncertain
and so violet

I would have thought there would be more Gaels in Ireland...

See, for example, noted Indo-European linguist Winfred Lehmann (male), who I spent several years mistakenly assuming was a woman.

The problem with putting together lists of gender-neutral names these days is it has a taste of shooting fish in a barrel. (At least in US culture.) I think you have to have some sort of threshold cut-off below which items fall in the "parents do crazy things to kids" category rather than the "gender neutral" category.

When I was writing Baby Names for Dummies one of the topics I had to fight not to get distracted by was patterns in gender-neutral names: Which names cross over and when? Does cross-over use end up replacing the original use? I was playing with the data-set from the Social Security Administration website which provides endless potential for cat vacuuming.

Avery
Blair
Casey
Dominique
Elisha
Frankie
Guadalupe
Harley
Infant
Justice
Kerry
Lavern
Marion
Numbers
Ollie
Peyton
Reilly
Shea
Taylor
Unknown
Vernie
Wei
Young

Okay, so Infant and Unknown are not actual names, but they were found when I compared males and females with the same given names from a proprietary database. (Baby, oddly enough, was two-thirds male.)

We can fill in the gaps with names that are not necessarily ambiguous but whose gender my co-workers and I could not determine:

Itzel
Qiong
Xiao
Zell

We only found these on a baby names wedsite we didn't trust because it said they were of Australian origin. If I don't know what gender they are, you probably don't either unless you know someone personally who has one of these names. That's good enough for hurricane names to confuse everyone.

Since I was paid to do this research, I should probably disclaim that this post is offered as-is and does not represent the opinions of my employer.

As you might imagine, the wisecracks like "nothing ghostly about that hit" are flowing like wine from the ESPN sportscasters.

You, too? At least I wasn't the grad student in my year who went through an entire oral presentation in the Anglo-Saxon seminar referring to Lehmann as "she" before being corrected by the professor after the finish.

I'm hoping for enough rain to top up the swimming pool but not enough wind to tip over the tomatoes.

Oh, and welcome back. Hope your recovery is going well.

Thanks for the good wishes. My recovery is going reasonably well.

Re surnames used as given names: the manager of paralegals at the law firm I worked for in 1980s named her first daughter Caroline. Nice, crisp, simple name. Her second daughter ended up being Carter Prentiss Boyer. Carter and Prentiss being the surnames of the two grandmothers. Everyone joked that the poor child sounded like a law firm.

I seem to remember that Democratic congressman Zell Miller, who endorsed Bush for President in 2004, was a man. I'm pleased to see he's been so widely forgotten.

PurpleGirl 103: Shirley for a man strikes me as at best unusual in the UK. Off the top of my head I can't think of any male Shirleys; but Shirley Williams and Shirley BasseyLinked text were both household names when I was growing up.

Moving Finger Writes, Moves On.

Attempts at correction meet limited success amid prayer, laughter, tears.

Now that's a good line. heh.

My grandfather's first name was Lynn. His father's name was Marion.

A more recent example is that one of my son's female nursery school classmates was named Cameron. This was in Scotland, the native home of the he-Cameron.

And, oddly enough, in the light of 113, Kamuran. (No idea, mostly m, occasionally f)

(For people with a passing knowledge of the Turkish language, I'm using 'gh' - as in yoghurt - to represent the soundless g; and omitting the umlauts in Ozgur; because I can't remember how to flip this keyboard form English to Turkish layout)

Cf Anne de Montmorency

who appears to have had a child (gender underknown to the Wikipedariat, and also to me) also called Anne.

She was promoted while I was there, and later made SGM, so the room for confusion was legion.

Is the Anne you mention from the Netherlands? If so, any idea what name would be on his passport? I'm wondering if it would have a Latin root (curious custom, that. Does that happen commonly outside of the Netherlands?), or just plain 'Anne'.

Obviously a Mainland Chinese name (usually rendered as Shaw or Chow in Cantonese), I've normally found that as a family name but there's Deng Xiao Ping as an example of it as a personal name.

For what it's worth, my Pinyin to English translation machine returns 50+ meanings for Xiao, ranging from "small" to "spider" to "military officer", so I don't think it's possible to give the name a gender without some kind of tonal clarification.

(For those tiny few who are unaware of Chinese naming conventions (*cough* Niven and Pournelle in The Gripping Hand[1] *cough*), Chinese names are family name first, followed by two personal names. i.e., Deng Xiao Ping is Mr Deng, Xiao Ping if you're being formal and ah-Ping if you're family or a friend.)

[1] No, Mr Wong Mei Ling's[2] daughter Joyce will not be called Joyce Mei Ling. She'll be Joyce Wong.

[2] Wong Mei Ling is Suzie Wong's Chinese name (From The World of Suzie Wong[3]). Mei Ling is "pretty butterfly" according to the three native Cantonese speakers in my household.

[3] obSF: The original theatrical version of the book starred William Shatner, later to become famous as an SF writer of some small reknown. Also, I think he was in a TV show which a few people here might have seen...

Shirley Crabtree

And as long as we're here, is there an easy way for non-Chinese speakers to tell whether a name has been Westernized? For example, I've seen both "Chow Yun Fat" and "Yun Fat Chow."

I've seen his (Dutch) passport. Anne.

(Latin name-forms are something I haven't encountered much anywhere but in the Netherlands. But they are common here. Very strange finding out that Peter is really Petrus, etc.)

Small correction on the Chinese names:
While what you described is most common, both family names and personal names can consist of either 1 or 2 Chinese characters. So a Chinese name can have 2 Characters to 4 characters.
Some examples:
1 character for family name + 1 for personal name: Li Bai (perhaps more famous as Li Bo)
1 family + 2 personal: Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, ..
2 family + 1 personal: Sima Qian (father of Chinese historiography)
2 family + 2 personal: Ouyang Ziyuan (the chief scientist of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, big proponent for both lunar and Mars exploitation programs)

Texanne @125

'Obviously' in that it's a pretty common sound in mainland Chinese names (as opposed to, say, a Cantonese name), and it's spelled with the pinyin transcription - which is used for mandarin, and cannot be used to spell Cantonese pronunciations. So 'obvious' for people in the know, I'd say.

Names specified in Pinyin are generally Mainland. Hong Kong names tend to be using the Cantonese pronouciation and to be rendered in a fashion which a colonial Brit might pronounce. Thus Shaw vs Xiao, or Chow vs Xiao.

It's mainly a matter of having a feeling for the pronounciation of a name and which dialect/language that pronouciation came from. For example, a Mr Wu is probably from a Mandarin speaking part of China, while a Mr Ng would be from Guangdong, Hong Kong or Macau (where Cantonese is spoken). Their name would be written with the same character, but the pronouciation would be different because of the langauge.

As for how to tell if a name is in the right order: it's kind of obvious if you know the kind of family names that people are likely to have depending on where you are, but I don't think I could codify a ruleset for it.

Incidentally, Mr Chow Yun Fat (family name Chow) is well known here in Hong Kong as not only a fine actor but also as an accomplished photographer and a very nice guy in general. He is almost the quintessential Local Boy Done Good.

Bombie, 127: Thanks. I'm still confused, but at least I know the shape of my ignorance a little better.

Texanne @129: well, the short answer is that there's a certain sound to Mandarin, which is different to the normal sound of Cantonese.

It's like the difference between Italian and Spanish: they may sound alike if you don't speak either, but spending some time in a place where one of the languages is spoken will allow you to differentiate between them, even if you don't speak either.

But Dad went through life with problems about what name to be called. His father was also Clare, so he didn't get called that at home, and he spent a lot of years being called "C.A." (is calling people in the US by initials mainly Southern, unless they're Chinese?) though later in life was mostly called Clare, which is what my mom called him. Using the middle name was Right Out - he absolutely hated being called Gus, and ditched it as soon as he could, though some of the cousins still refer to him as Uncle Gus.

I can think of one trick for the layman to differentiate between a mainland Chinese name and a Cantonese name. A big, visible difference between pinyin* and Cantonese is that mainland Chinese has no sounds that and with a -p, -t, or -k. Cantonese does. So if you think a name is Chinese, that's a trick to take a more educated guess as to its origin.

Don't know if this helps. :)

--
* You can always 'cheat', and see if you find the sound in this table.

(I've seen the sound that pinyin uses 'x' for transliterated also as 'hs', which is closer to what it sounds like.)

As mentioned elsewhere (this thread? another thread?), the pinyin transliteration can only represent sounds from the official Chinese dialect (which for many Chinese is a widely-shared second language, as their own dialect is so vastly different as to be a language in its own right - bleeding over to another thread again).

The actual sounds in the official dialect is those in the table times four - Chinese is a tonal language, and the official dialect has 4 tones (Cantonese has more). For an idea of what it sounds like, here's the 'xiao' from Deng Xiaoping (click 'listen'). If you want to listen to any of the sounds in the table, just write it in the search box, pick any character from the results list (lots of homonyms, especially when you don't take tone into consideration), and click listen again.

Also, P J Evans' X and Q tip is a good visual trick as well.

Other friends who were Hakka from Vietnam had multiple sets of names. His name was Le, and his wife always got annoyed when bureaucrats wrote her name as Le, because her family name was Ly, and just because if sounded the same to gringos didn't mean she was using her husband's name. In addition to Chinese personal-names, they also had Vietnamese ones, and the kids adopted English ones when they moved here, and there were also family-position names (I think they were Hakka, but might have been Vietnamese, but Joe's name translated to "Number One Son", etc.)

Dutch Catholics often get a Christian name (with which they are baptised, I think) on their passport, which is the original Latin root from which the name they end op using is derived.

So Dutch Catholics who are called 'Jan', 'Han', 'Johan', .. will all share the same 'Johannes' on their official documents; 'Piet' and 'Peter' will share 'Petrus'; 'Wim' and 'Willem' will share 'Wilhelminus'; Katie, Trien, Katrien, .. will share Catarina, &c.

I'm don't actually know what comes first: do they pick a root first, and then see which derivative they like best, or pick a common name first, and then go for the root. I wonder if a people change derivative during their lifetime, say a Peter becoming a Piet (as it's not official).

Come to think of it, perhaps the Russian's have a similar custom, i.e. naming children after popular saints and in practice using derivatives and diminutives..? But I'm not too familiar with this practice, so I can't say for certain.

Also, the pinyin table is very interesting and even playing the sounds over and over again I still can't quite hear what distinguishes the tone indicated by the inverted-caret (tone 3). (To my north-American-English ear, tone 1 is "high", tone 2 is "question" and tone 4 is "normal but kind of short," which I'm imagining from the diacritical is a falling tone.)

Fascinating.

I used to know a Brazilian guy named Fabio Roberto Gardenal da Silva. He was registered for school as Roberto da Silva, but performed (he was a pianist) as Fabio Gardenal.

Your north-American-English ear is a damned good ear. The third tone starts pretty low, drops a bit further, and then rises (but not as high as the questioning second tone).

Here a diagram which I hope might clarify the shape of the tones a bit.

I think that there has been a growth in the number of names that can now be considered gender neutral, but I've noticed that it's mostly traditionally male names being used for females. (A co-worker of my husband's had a daughter they named Taylor Jordan. And then were surprised when office mates had to ask 'girl or boy?')

He led the Flying Tigers (an all-volunteer service) in China before the United States entered World War II. When America entered the war, he took command of all Allied Air Forces in the Far East.

Everyone has three names, personal, patronymic, and family (Michael Sergeyivich Gorbachyov, Piotr Illych Tchaikofsky, etc.).

If one doesn't know the person then an honorific (mister/comrade) + family name is the form of address (e.g. Gospodin Pushkin Tovarisch Brezhnyev).

If one is on speaking terms with someone, then the personal + patronymic are used (e.g. Anna Pavlova, Mikhael Sergeyivich), without honorific.

If one is friendly, then just the given name.

If one is an intimate, then a diminutive (which are set... Mikhael = Misha, Vladimir = Volodya, etc.). For those with whom one is truly close, hyper diminutives may be used. Misha become Mishka, Sasha becomes Sashulka, and so forth (again this are set forms).

None of this, of course, precludes the use of pet-names and other sorts of nicknames, but there isn't any free-form way to change the ways in which names derive.

Which brings us back to War and Peace, Tolstoy gives all the names when someone is introduced, so that he can, with a quick stroke of the pen, show how the relationships between people work, and change, as the story moves alone.

Maury is his son.

Yep.

The little knowledge I have of the naming tradition, I got from War and Peace. But that's Russian high society, 200 years ago. I'm wondering how widespread this practice is today (especially the use of patronymic names). Most of the Russians I encountered and interacted with* introduced themselves with their diminutive name, only sometimes mentioning the full name its derived from. Now I'm wondering if they were being really kind to me, and I was too uncultured to notice, or if their customs became less strict.

--
* All of them of the same generation - just come of age/early twenties, most of them from somewhere in Siberia, so hardly a representative sample. Neither is Tolstoy's.

About 'male' names moving to women, I'm using my copy of Agricola's "DE Re metallica" just now, and it was translated by HErbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover, who was his wife, and I recall photographs of people like Mrs George Smith. It seems to me that it has always been more common for mens names to go to being womans in some way, eg alexander to alexandra. I've always put that down to the general patriarchal influence frowning upon transfer the other way and the male being exalted so that calling your women by more masculine names seems appropriate.

Hmm... Dolores -> Lolita comes to mind offhand. I'm sure there are others, but I'm not caffeinated yet.

They use their given name/diminutive in much the same way the given/patronymic pair used to be used. That said the use of the older pattern isn't completely dead.

When dealing with westerners, they tend to jump straight to the diminutive (which is more to the order, these days of an english speaker saying, "Call me James" when introduced as "X" Last Name".

No, this isn't true: it depends on the name/diminutive/person. I've had both Aleksandrs, and Sashas, Dimitri and Dimas, etc.

I've also had a few use the double-barreled form. Perhaps, on the day that the verb, "tikovat" become obsolete (i.e. to speak in the informal conjugation, that is, You may use "thee" with me), then too with the use of names to express intimacy go away.

I say that because it occurs to me that all of the relationships I've had with Russians/Ukrainians have been as either working equals, or situations in which I was the "senior" person. In the casual introductions, I got the, "Marina Stefanova" formulation.

I'd also point out Tolstoy wasn't actually recalling the ways of use in 1812, but rather of 20-50 years later, since he was born in 1828, and wrote the book in the 1860s.

Golden emailed about coming by to pick the current accumulation up while briefly in town to deal with the care facility. Golden was named for his dad, and Willie is the mother.

Lyn was named after his father Lyndon, and Dean was her middle name (she was named after her mother, and there were three of them in her family....I don't remember what her first name was officially).

A guy named Gail: Gail Borden.

These days, Laverne could be considered a girl's name; e.g., "and Shirley."

But it used to be a boy's name; e.g., my great-grandfather, Milton Laverne [lastname]. Also, Harlan Ellison's father, Louis Laverne Ellison.

An obscure example is Kari - a girl's name everywhere in Scandinavia; except in Finland, where it's a boy's name.

ddb: I think the middle name flexibility stems from it being oft the case names of forbears are used. Since, as we've seen some names (Joyce, Marion) have changed primary gender, it's easier to get such a name.