Tropical Storm Gabrielle Spaghetti
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From J.M.:
Much amusement online this morning about a tropical storm that is named Gabrielle Spaghetti and is apparently doing some modeling work.
Screenshot:
I always book my talent from Gabrielle Spaghetti Models.
— Drumsicle (@drumsicle.bsky.social) September 15, 2025 at 12:09 PM
The actual current spaghetti plot for Gabrielle, from the Newsweek article:
Noam said,
September 15, 2025 @ 4:03 pm
I was only familiar with the scientific usage in https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/a/1788 but now I’m wondering what other meanings it had
S Frankel said,
September 15, 2025 @ 4:48 pm
And 'Chances' is a strange name for a hurricane.
Jonathan Smith said,
September 15, 2025 @ 7:14 pm
So the proper reading takes the form NP + "as" + sentence? This seems to be OK headlinese occasionally but not here… first OK example I can googlefu is "Contamination concerns over Huntington Beach oil spill as investigation continues"
Rick Rubenstein said,
September 15, 2025 @ 9:20 pm
After her modeling career she went on to star in several Westerns.
JimG said,
September 15, 2025 @ 10:54 pm
I recognize this as a collision between several academic/professional communities' jargon.
My daughter-in-law was program coordinator for a center at Florida's enormous state Univ. of Central Fla, teaching modeling and simulation. (Tangentially, she got occasional mail from young women who wanted to study for credentials in [fashion] modeling).
We know that hurricane forecasters use modeling and simulation to visualize potential paths that hurricane Gabrielle might follow, and the map plots are called spaghetti plots.
TV news department staff, dangerously equipped with a little knowledge of the academic and weather forecasting fields, committed fodder for linguistic curiousity discussion.
JPL said,
September 16, 2025 @ 1:48 am
Just to point out that the only way the Newsweek headline makes sense is if "models" is the main verb of the first clause, even though Gabrielle is not really acting as the agent/actor of the modelling event. But it is an interesting manner of speaking to evoke the image that she (it) is. ("plots" (transitive) wouldn't work, since since it would be difficult to take the hurricane, as opposed to the meteorologists, as the agent of the event understood in that way.) The "as" clause is presented as a suspected ongoing worrying development for which the appearance of the coterminous spaghetti modelling is an expected visual manifestation. So a nicely creative headline.
JPL said,
September 16, 2025 @ 1:53 am
Oh, I forgot (see the other post), maybe they could have put an en dash after "spaghetti".
J.W. Brewer said,
September 16, 2025 @ 6:34 am
To make a point similar to JPL but less complimentary, even if one is already familiar with the notion of a "spaghetti model" and open to the possibility of that NP being verbed, it's a confusing headline because the "thematic" roles/relations have been flipped. The storm itself is not the modeler, but the modelee, but you would expect the syntactic subject matched with the verb to be the modeler. I suppose it's not impossible that an intransitive variant of the verb "to spaghetti model" with the roles thus flipped could have emerged within meteorological jargon, although if so it would be bad journalism to use it with a general audience w/o explanation.
Jonathan Smith said,
September 16, 2025 @ 9:20 am
… still pretty sure the "correct" reading is "[Here are / We discuss] tropical storm Gabrielle spaghetti models as [as we speak] hurricane chances increase"
David Marjanović said,
September 16, 2025 @ 9:25 am
Yes. It's a train wreck of a compound noun: (((tropical storm) Gabrielle) (spaghetti models)).
German is famous for its long compound nouns, but English ones actually get longer and more complex because the spelling disguises them from both readers and writers.
JPL said,
September 16, 2025 @ 4:06 pm
I wasn't claiming, in my somewhat tongue-in-cheek comment above, to be presenting the "correct" interpretation, but only suggesting that this was the more interesting interpretation. The headline is an example of ambiguous expression, and I'm always looking for the less obvious interpretations and wondering where they came from. I imagine the meteorologists saying, e.g., "How we doing with Gabrielle?", and "Yeah, Gabby is now spaghetti-modelling, so we're on!". This use of 'model' is intransitive, similar to "Gabby is now dancing", with the "actor" type of role expressed. "Gabby used to be an actor, but these days she's modelling." I suggested that the "flipping" of the semantic roles was possible and more creative, because it allowed the personification trope. The more prosaic "plot", which is usually transitive in its uses in the required sense, would not allow such "flipping". Jonathan Smith is probably right about the correct interpretation, sadly, for my taste.