Weather or not

Here at Snow Theory central, we are very concerned about the discourse analytical implications of weather.

Everyone talks about it, as Mark Twain quipped, but the real point is how they talk about it.

Weather forecasting is one area in which modern society still indulges in superstition. We may not be as fanatical as citizens of Constantinople, but all winter long we let dubious tricksters jack us with the possibility that a wintry mix will keep the kids home, slow the commute. We are not so different from those ancients who ran to the corner temple to find out if the dark cloud formation meant that we should sacrifice a chicken instead of offering three silver coins to the local weather deity.

The answer depends on the priest’s, i.e. station manager’s, agenda, do you want to cook chicken for dinner or do you want to go out to eat, or more precisely, are you pushing stuff left over from the President’s Day sale or last year’s Dodge inventory? Weathermen are the low-end shamans of modernity, they are either clever and ugly, or pretty and witless. They succeed because they claim to have local knowledge: “snow here in the tri-state area.” They invent new geographic terms for their viewing audience, “a cold front moving through the mid-state valley region.”

The very uncertainty of their predictions means that we always have to stay tuned. Sometimes they emphasize how tenuous their forecast is, “more at eleven, check our web site for updates.” Their real accomplishment is turning vague information into advertising cash, and that is most definitely doing something about the weather.