Aperfect storm is a meteorological event aggravated by a rare combination of circumstances.[1] The term is used by analogy to an unusually severestorm that results from a rare combination ofmeteorological phenomena.
Before the early 1990s, the phrases "storm of the century" or "perfect storm" were generally used to describe unusually large or destructive storms.[2] The termsuperstorm was employed in 1993 by the USNational Weather Service to describea Nor'easter in March of that year.[3] The term is most frequently used to describe aweather pattern that is as destructive as ahurricane, but which exhibits the cold-weather patterns of awinter storm.[4]
The Oxford English Dictionary has published references going back to 1718 for "perfect storm", though the earliest citations use the phrase in the sense of "absolute" or "complete", or for emphasis, as in "a perfect stranger".
The phrase appears inWilliam Makepeace Thackeray's novelVanity Fair (1847-1848)
I have heard a brother of the story-telling trade at Naples preaching to a pack of good-for-nothing honest, lazy fellows by the sea-shore, work himself up into such a rage and passion with some of the villains whose wicked deeds he was describing and inventing, that the audience could not resist it; and they and the poet together would burst out into a roar of oaths and execrations against the fictitious monster of the tale, so that the hat went round, and the bajocchi tumbled into it, in the midst of a perfect storm of sympathy.
The first known use of the expression in the meteorological sense is on May 30, 1850, when the Rev. Lloyd ofWithington describes ″A perfect storm of thunder and lightning all over England (except London) doing fearful and fatal damage″ when recording monthly rainfall measurements for that year. This record is kept by the UK Meteorological Office.[5] The next recorded instance is in the March 20, 1936, issue of thePort Arthur News in Texas: "The weather bureau describes the disturbance as 'the perfect storm' of its type. Seven factors were involved in the chain of circumstances that led to the flood."[6]
In 1993, journalist and authorSebastian Junger planned to write a book about a fishing boat caught in the1991 Halloween Nor'easter storm. Technically, this storm was anextratropical cyclone. In the course of his research, he spoke withBob Case, who had been a deputymeteorologist in the Boston office of theNational Weather Service at the time of thestorm. Case described to Junger the confluence of three different weather-related phenomena that combined to create what Case referred to as the "perfect situation" to generate such a storm:
From that, Junger keyed on Case's use of the wordperfect and coined the phraseperfect storm, choosing to useThe Perfect Storm as the title of his book.
Junger published his bookThe Perfect Storm in 1997 and its success brought the phrase into popular culture. Its adoption was accelerated with the release of the2000 feature film adaptation of Junger's book.Since the release of the movie, the phrase has grown to mean any event where a situation is aggravated drastically by an exceptionally rare combination of circumstances.[1]
Although the1991 Halloween Nor'easter was a powerful storm by any measure, there have been other storms that have exceeded its strength. According to Case, the type of convergence of weather events to which he was referring, while unusual, is not exceptionally rare or unique, despite the way the phrase is commonly used.[7][8]
From the beginning, the phrase was in heavy use during thefinancial crisis of 2007–2008, even to the point of pundits anticipating "another perfect storm".[9]
The phrase was awarded the top prize byLake Superior State University in their 2007 list of words that deserve to be banned for overuse.[1]
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