Hurricane Kris

I was amused by this BBC article on the naming of hurricanes. With such an unusually active hurricane season this year, meteorologists are worried that we could run out of names for the first time ever. (If that happens, we’ll name them after letters of the Greek alphabet.) The bit that made me laugh though, was this bit of historical trivia:

Individual names began to be attached in the 1950s, with US meteorologists using initially the phonetic alphabet and then female names… In the 1970s feminist groups succeeded in changing the nomenclature to alternating male and female names.

I guess I can see where I might take offense if terribly destructive storms were only named after women, but seriously ladies, weren’t there more important things to worry about? I don’t want to seem ungrateful here, but I personally would have prioritized, say, equal pay for equal work over the equal gender division of hurricane nomenclature.