Wherein We Name the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Disaster, and About Time

This oil spill thing needs a name.  Consider:

• Chernobyl.
• Katrina.
• Exxon Valdez.
• 9/11.
• Three-Mile Island.
• Love Canal.
• Pearl Harbor
• Mt. St. Helens.
• Amoco Cadiz
• Hiroshima.
• Krakatoa.
• Pompeii

Each of those words or phrases succinctly calls forth from memory a recognizable event -- a disastrous event -- and all of its associations.  At present we have nothing similarly dramatic for – what are we calling it? “The BP Oil Spill.” “The Gulf Oil Disaster.” I haven’t heard anything that I would consider either memorable enough, specific enough, dramatic enough, or short enough to serve as a repeated reference to what has happened.

"Gulf Oil Spill" seems to have gained some currency.  I don't like it or any of its variations, mainly because what has happened is not a spill.  Spills go from higher places to lower places -- gravity is what makes a spill a spill.  This effluvia does just the opposite, shooting upward.  "Spills" are also singular events, bounded in time and volume.  This one -- no.   "Gulf Oil Spill" also fails to remind us of the villain here (there are many, I know, but one over-villain).  And what about when we have an actual spill in the Gulf of Mexico, or some other Gulf? 

Comparing the present disaster  to those in my list, we can see that this particular event is not associated with a uniquely named spot on the globe. Oceanographic cartographers may have a name for that location, but I can’t seem to find one.

How about the name of the rig itself?  The Exxon Valdez and Amoco Cadiz were oil disasters associated with the name of the ships.  Here, "Deepwater Horizon," the name of the rig that asploded, has a nice ring to it.  But it's too late to adopt that as a name for this event.  Too hard to sell.

I propose one that is short, alliterative, descriptive, colorful, and memorable:

    

  The BP Blowout

“Blowout” is a great violent word, almost onomatopoetic, calling up images of both the explosion itself and of the crude billowing out of the ruined pipe.  “BP” gives it instant context.

So henceforth, that’s what I’m going to call it. 

In the nick of time, I might add.

The Cool Hot Center grants you a worldwide perpetual royalty-free right and license to use the phrase as well.  When you do, people will know instantly what you're talking about, and you'll sound very much more hip than people who are still calling it the dreary old "Gulf Oil Spill."
 
And pass it along to all your friends and news directors and copy editors of your acquaintance.  Let's get this thing rolling, people.

Did you Hear POTUS Supporting The Cool Hot Center? Peggy Noonan Did

Faithful visitors to The Cool Hot Center will recall my two-parter of a couple of weeks ago where I expressed my view that the President is in love with the academy, that it is in love with him, and that this explains a lot about his Presidency.

If you heard his here-and-gone Oval Office speech on the BP Oil Spill a couple of evenings ago, you heard some striking evidence of that. Peggy Noonan caught it in her editorial this morning in the Wall Street Journal

“[G]rowing weaknesses showed up in small phrases. The president said he had consulted among others 'experts in academia' on what to do about the calamity. This while noting, again, that his energy secretary has a Nobel Prize. There is a growing meme that Mr. Obama is too impressed by credentialism, by the meritocracy, by those who hold forth in the faculty lounge, and too strongly identifies with them. He should be more impressed by those with real-world experience. It was the 'small people' in the shrimp boats who laid the boom.”

President Obama in the Oval Office

Exactly.