Martin Fowler in his Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture says: "this design sucks like an inverted hurricane". I can't get the last part. What does the "inverted hurricate" mean in this context? Or is this an untranslatable idiom?
asked Nov 12, 2015 at 11:19
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1It's a simile; it hasn't reached 'idiom' status (yet?) with only about 50 Google hits.– Edwin AshworthNov 12, 2015 at 11:31
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1 Answer
A hurricane is a vast spinning storm that produces powerful winds that blow out from its centrifugal force. This is the opposite of something that sucks things into itself. To get a storm that sucked (literally), you'd need the opposite (figuratively) of a hurricane. Which would be an inverted (totally turned inside out) hurricane.
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@TimRomano He is a big joker actually ;) Sometimes he sounds sardonic in his book. BTW, I am not really sure its him because different chapters of the book were written by different people. But when you read, narrator feels the almost the same. Nov 12, 2015 at 11:35
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1Though technically a hurricane sucks too. The eye has extremely low pressure, and this is what drives it. So it's unclear why it needs to be "inverted". Nov 12, 2015 at 12:39
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1Yes, As Edwin Ashworth commented, it's a simile. However it is a very poor one. An inverted hurricane wouldn't suck (or blow) any more than a non-inverted one. In fact it would rapidly peter out due to the coriolis force opposing its direction of spin. In the Southern hemisphere a 'hurricane' spins in the opposite direction and is called a cyclone -- cyclones are typically weak in comparison. Nov 12, 2015 at 13:32
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Perhaps the simile sucks worse than the proposed hurricane, but it's best not to take Inverted too literally to mean opposite chirality but reverse effect, basically a large tornado.– deadratNov 12, 2015 at 20:01