After a few mild winters, we here in New York’s First Capital have to endure a hard snow season reminiscent of the kinds our ancestors told us about when we expressed any opinion at all about whatever winter we were having at the time. “You think that’s a lot of snow, do ye? Well, you young whippersnapper, I remember the Blizzard of [18]’88 when the snow was so high, we had to wait until the Fourth of July to leave the house!” Indeed, some of us on your Editorial Team have reeled in sufficient years to remember the 1996 and 1993 storms which both dropped two-plus feet of the white stuff on the Hudson Valley. A few of us are even old enough to recall the Blizzard of [19]’77, when so much snow was dumped on the Buffalo region — over eight feet in some parts — there was not only serious talk of evacuating that city and abandoning it to the elements, but some were speculating that we were on the brink of entering the next ice age.

Almost 50 years later, things are different: whatever else global warming has or hasn’t done, nobody goes around saying another ice age is coming. But that hasn’t calmed people down about snowstorms. The trend is actually going the other way, because in an “attention economy” the quickest way to make people pay attention is to make them afraid. If you can’t exactly do that, another way to get people to consume your content is to hype things up so the commonplace appears extraordinary and the routine seems special.

This brings us to the theme of this week’s screed. Something has gotten our metaphorical goat, and we need to talk about it. (Our actual goats are doing just great, thanks, though you won’t be seeing them at the Kingston Farmers’ Market anymore for reasons discussed previously. Horse-drawn carriages never had a chance in this town.) Until about 15 years ago, winter storms were winter storms — if they were snowy enough, they’d get called the “Blizzard of [insert year],” but most of the time they were referred to as “that time there was two feet of snow and we had three days off of school.”

Which seemed just fine, that is to everybody but the Weather Channel. Back in 2012, the nation’s leading purveyor of meteorological information and smooth jazz started to give winter storms names, like the National Weather Service gives to hurricanes. Why exactly isn’t clear, but we suspect it’s a marketing ploy. “A snowstorm expected to deliver 10 inches to the tri-state area” just doesn’t pop the way “Winter Storm Alex” does. Hurricanes are usually pretty dangerous affairs, frequently taking hundreds of lives and doing billions in property damage. Winter storms rarely, if ever, match that level of havoc, but as they used to say in the newspaper business, you have to sometimes make the news fit the headline. The conspiratorially minded may draw links to the Weather Channel and Big Bread, Milk and Eggs, as sales of all three spike the minute people find out the flakes are going to fly.

It’s part of, your Editorial Team reckons, the larger societal trend of “naming rights” — people paying to have things like stadiums and arenas bear their name. We’ve gotten used to it, but it still strikes us from time to time as too much. “Welcome to the Joe’s Pizza Midtown Roundabout” is something we would not be surprised to read in days to come. Or maybe it will be something like, “Welcome to the Hudson Valley Mall iPark 87” or, even, the “iPark 87 Hudson Valley Mall.” Heck, maybe we’ll pay the city to have “the Kingston Wire North Front Street Parking Lot.”

While many have accepted this as just one more thing that’s happened in the pageant of humanity and point out that there are many more troubling matters deserving attention, we’re going to push back. Some local media outlets have called the Sunday weather event “Winter Storm Fern,” seemingly taken in by the hype. (Fern? Really? Did somebody at the Weather Channel have an Aunt Fern back in the 1970s who used to wear muumuus, drink Tab and smoke Virginia Slims? If we’re going to come up with names for things that don’t need them, can these names at least be current? Winter Storm Bad Bunny, anyone?)

We at Kingston Wire pledge to keep our weather coverage calm, cool and collected and as free from hype as we can. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it snows. The weather affects us all to one degree or another, and we all have good reason to be wary of how climate change can intensify everyday storms into potential catastrophes. But we shouldn’t give in to corporations’ constant push to control common culture and tell us what we need to be afraid of and what we don’t. Indeed, we’d like to see a federal law granting exclusive naming rights to climatological events to the National Weather Service. Maybe then people will start to calm down when they hear it’s going to snow and prepare to handle the weather with common sense.