Storm Names as Comparative Benchmarks: Lay Referential Uptake of Institutional Weather Names in German YouTube Comments.

Abstract

In brief. German storms are given names — Kyrill, Sabine, Lothar. This study asks what ordinary speakers do with those names years afterwards. The answer is that they mostly use them to measure: people write "worse than Kyrill" or "will it be as bad as Lothar?", treating the old name as a yardstick rather than a memory. One exception is striking. The 2021 Ahr valley flood killed far more people than Kyrill did and was officially named Bernd, yet almost nobody uses that name; they say "the Ahr valley" or "the flood". Being named and being catastrophic is not enough for a name to catch on. Institutional weather naming has been studied mainly through journalistic uptake and survey recall, whereadoption is largely a function of press-release circulation. Whether lay speakers take up such names as referential resources, and to what end, remains unmeasured. This study examines 16,229 comments from 157 German-language YouTube videos on named weatherevents, collected in a single session. Rather than measuring name use under videos about the named event itself — where the name is supplied by the video — the analysis isolates cross-event mentions: cases in which commenters invoke a storm other than the one under discussion. Automatic retrieval returned 100 candidates, coded independently by two coders blind to the hypothesis (Krippendorff's α = .90 for storm reference; α =.84 for the central functional distinction).Sixty-four candidates were confirmed as storm references by both coders. Of these, 35 were independently classified as serving a comparative standard: the name is used to measure the severity of some other event. The distribution is not that of a memory archive. One event dominates — Kyrill (2007) accounts for 21 of 64confirmed references and 16 of 35 benchmark uses. Speakers extend the inventory productively, coiningforms without institutional source (Kyrill 2.0, Big King Lothar, Kyrill-Kaliber).A contrasting case supports this reading. The 2021 Western European floods, institutionally named Bernd,caused substantially greater loss of life than Kyrill, yet the name occurs twice in 6,234 comments on the event (0.03%), against place-based reference at 5.1% and event-type description at 8.2%. The single confirmed Bernd reference in the cross-event set was coded as recollection, not benchmark. The contrast is consistent with a scope condition: comparative uptake may depend jointly on event commensurability and on competition from alternative labels such as place names.