When Hurricane Hermine made landfall along the Florida Panhandle I rolled my eyes when the Huffington Post and Daily Beast described the storm "smashing" into the coast. As a category 1 hurricane, the verb "smash" was overstating its power just a bit. But in this day and age of constant hyperbole, the bar for danger has been lowered so much that every dark cloud is reported as being as dangerous as epic hurricanes of the past such as Camille, Hugo or Andrew. And while the hurricane intensity chart shows the type of mayhem that can result with each category of hurricane, I think it would be helpful to add a column for the news media to provide them with the the appropriate adjectives, as shown below.
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