Meteorology

I've just re-read The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger (1997). It's extremely interesting, although it is about sailors and there is a bit of language. Oddly enough, the level of discourse drops only when sailors are quoted. Hmm. Let that be a warnin' to ye.

The author himself has a remarkable talent with words. In the following paragraph, he describes how the jet stream contributes to storms over the Atlantic ocean. Do you care about that? Neither did I, until Junger tossed in some fantastic active verbs and a great metaphor. Here goes:

"Ultimately, the engine behind all of this activity is the jet stream, a river of cold upper-level air that screams around the globe at thirty or forty thousand feet. Storms, cold fronts, short-wave troughs - they're all dragged eastward sooner or later by upper-level winds. The jet stream is not steady; it convulses like a loose firehose, careening off mountains, veering across plains. These irregularities create continent-sized eddies that come ballooning out of the Arctic as deep cold fronts. They are called anticyclones because the cold air in them flows outwards and clockwise, the opposite of a low. It is along the leading edge of these anticyclones that low-pressure waves sometimes develop; occasionally, one of these waves will intensify into a major storm. Why, and when, is still beyond the powers of science to predict. It typically happens over areas where a leg of the jet stream collides with subtropical air - the Great Lakes, the Gulf Stream off Hatteras, the southern Appalachians. Since air flows counterclockwise around these storms, the winds come out of the northeast as they move offshore. For that reason they're known as 'nor-easters.' Meteorologists have another name for them. They call them 'bombs.'"

The metaphor is easy to spot, but I'm counting at least seven great active verbs. I'm not counting the ordinary, everyday verbs.