Over the weekend, I was seeing a lot of references to “Winter Storm Jonas.” I grew up in Ohio, so facebook associates who had moved from Ohio to the mid-Atlantic were posting about how Washington TOTALLY can’t handle winter weather. Transplanted Texas facebook associates, meanwhile, were saying Washington was handling the snow just about as poorly as the Metroplex does.

This isn’t a blog about who’s better than whom at handling snow. This is a blog about this ridiculous thing where we name winter storms now.

Listen, loyal Scaiaholics, the whole winter storms with a name thing was just cooked up a few years ago by Big Weather. Winter storms are now being named like hurricanes, like they’re sexy. Now, any time it gets blustery, we all have to start tweeting with proper nouns.

I’m concerned that we appear to be headed in the direction of naming everything that’s slightly inconvenient, even if it’s a common occurrence, like snow in the winter.

But maybe I’m going too far. Maybe I sound too Anti-Naming-Things. In the spirit of Big Weather, I’m going to start naming my daily commute, since that’s quite inconvenient. I’ll get the hashtag trending. Consider:

Can you believe this guy just cruising down the left lane?! It’s taking forever to get thru Irving on Hwy 183! #CommuteLeon

Or:

A DPS trooper just told me to stop pulling onto the shoulder every mile to post tweets because my erratic driving is slowing down traffic. #CommuteLeon.

You know, I minored in meteorology and climatology in college, which means Ball State University has declared me an authority on the named storms issue [Note: do NOT actually check with Ball State to confirm that a meteorology minor amounts to a position of authority on naming things].

My concern is that no one is cross checking these lists to make sure winter storm names aren’t the same as hurricane names. Imagine, some winter, we could have Blizzard Melmac and then the following summer, we could have Hurricane Melmac! How gauche!

Here’s another thing to consider: the names of particularly destructive hurricanes are retired. Are we going to start doing the same thing for blizzards? Like, if a blizzard leads to a record number of adorable snowmen?

While I rant, the Weather Channel’s marketing department is probably hard at work looking for the next thing to slap a name on.

Goodbye Winter Storm Jonas. Later this week, get ready for Mostly Sunny Day Theo.