Gomez |
A haboob is defined as "a violent and oppressive wind blowing in summer, especially in Sudan, bringing sand from the desert." The part about the desert explains why we don't use the word "haboob" so often in Maryland, being far from desert lands as we are.
But anyway, back in Phoenix, where the desert is close at hand, a haboob came along and knocked out the power and Pedro was the victim of an all-time autocorrect mixup:
Those doggone baboons!
Such hostility! And Nimrod was a man described in the Bible as "the first on earth to be a mighty man" and "a mighty hunter before the Lord" so using his name in derision is sort of dumb, like confusing a sandstorm, which covers a large area, with a haboob, which by definition covers a narrow zone.
We often borrow words from other nations to describe weather phenomena, such as a tsunami, the Japanese term for a seismic sea wave, or drumpf, the German term for a large pile of unpleasantness that drops in unexpectedly.
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