Uproar is just another word for a storm

What is happening in Kenya’s ruling alliance? TheStandard drew our attention to it in this headline on page 4 of its June 22 number: “Uproar over Waiguru probe at NYS exposes political storm in Jubilee”.

Apparently, Kenya’s sub-editors just will never allow the preposition “over” to breathe some oxygen.

But much more interesting is the meteorological phenomenon in which a storm cannot be experienced until uproar has “exposed” it. Because this puts storm and uproar in a causal relationship, the Nairobi daily newspaper makes uproar and storm two completely different phenomena.

What I have thought hitherto is that, at least in politics and other social contexts, uproar is just another word for storm, a synonym of it. My dictionary, Collins, describes a storm as “a violent weather condition of strong wind, rain, hail, thunder, lightning…” But that is only the literal definition of a storm.

What about the oral missiles that many a William Ruto may hurl at Raila Odinga? What about the Noachian deluge of bilge water that many a Charity Ngilu may pour on her ubiquitous political tormentors? What about the holier-than-thou verbal tirade with which many a Boni Khalwale may seek to fell his critics?

Linked, since these are, to human social relationships and interests, such merely figurative definitions of a storm may be a hundred times more forceful than the literal definition. In one of his most delightful comedies, William Shakespeare — that observer par excellence of the human theatre — cites one of these by asserting that “hell hath no fury” like that of a woman scorned.

Kenya is exemplary of the states in which what happens on the political front is nothing less than a storm of the kind that besets the inhabitants of Gehenna. In some other countries — especially in the Middle East and Latin America — the storm is much more like the tsunami that periodically convulses an ocean known — tongue-in-cheek — as the Pacific.

But this other manner of putting it is metaphorical only. In this grammatical context, uproar is just a synonym of — merely another word for — a storm. Both refer, namely, to the same situation, the one (like a tsunami) quite real, and the other (like the volcanic lava that gushes out of many a Mbuvi Sonko’s mouth) only a figure of speech.

In short, uproar can cause a storm just as little as ice can cause water or temperature can cause heat. Why, ice and water are the same thing, chemically, and, therefore, cannot cause each other. By the same token, uproar and a storm can “expose” each other just as little as a rip-off can expose corruption.

Collins describes uproar as “…a commotion or disturbance characterised by loud noise and confusion…” That, too, is the definition of a storm, except that a storm may be more objective than uproar, this being the subjective reaction of a group of members of a species so conscious as to be appalled by certain things that human beings habitually do to one another.

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