Saturday, September 07, 2019
Ling Ling bring the big dingaling
Typhoon Ling Ling (Lingling, Ling-ling, whatever) is currently brushing up against the Korean peninsula. Based on the snapshot of the Weather.com map below, I get the impression that Pyeongyang, to the north, is getting it worse than South Korea is. Then again, as you can see at the bottom of the map, there are some questing tendrils, with lots of red in them, working their way northward into South Korea. I don't know how all that is is going to pan out, but we're battening down the hatches here. Seoul, a bit like the DC-Metro area in the winter, is often a place of disappointment after weathermen announce that something big is going to happen. I suspect things aren't going to be that bad. But we'll see.
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We ended up seeing very little of the storm here, I think mainly because we were shielded by Gwanak-san. Seoul in general was spared from the worst of it, although I have seen pictures on the news of downed trees, and apparently a church steeple was ripped off and dropped to the ground.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I'm not sure I would describe this as a "disappointment." Meteorologists often predict the worst-case scenario and later turn out to be wrong (because, as it turns out, predicting the weather is hard), but I don't think "disappointment" is the right word to describe that. I mean, I get what you're saying, of course. I experience it more as a mild annoyance, though, having been worked up over nothing.
Anyway, unless the storm weakens considerably before it makes landfall, things will likely be bad for North Korea.
At the simplest level, a disappointment is merely a failure to meet expectations. (See def. 1 here.) So by my lights, the use of "disappointment" in my post is perfectly apropos. If you want to use "mild annoyance" instead, you're free to do so, with my blessing.
ReplyDeleteI guess my original thought was that disappointment is generally associated with negative outcomes (the definition you quoted refers to "expectations or wishes,"), and Seoul not getting majorly slammed by a typhoon is a positive outcome, however misled we might feel. I feel somewhat annoyed that I was misled, but I am not disappointed that the storm was far less severe for us than predicted.
ReplyDeleteThe downside of these inaccurate predictions, of course--and we see this with hurricanes in the States--is that people stop taking them seriously, and then when things really go south you've got some idiots hiking in the mountains who need to be rescued by chopper when they get stranded in a flash flood.
For me, as a storm-lover, the negative outcome is the current flaccidity of the weather, so I'd still say that "disappointment" is le mot juste. And since I don't want to spend more time defending my (perfectly legitimate) diction, I'll leave off here.
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