Perfect storm

The phrase appears in William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair (1847-1848) I have heard a brother of the story-telling trade at Naples preaching to a pack of good-for-nothing honest, lazy fellows by the sea-shore, work himself up into such a rage and passion with some of the villains whose wicked deeds he was describing and inventing, that the audience could not resist it; and they and the poet together would burst out into a roar of oaths and execrations against the fictitious monster of the tale, so that the hat went round, and the bajocchi tumbled into it, in the midst of a perfect storm of sympathy.The first known use of the expression in the meteorological sense is on May 30, 1850, when the Rev.

Lloyd of Withington describes ″A perfect storm of thunder and lightning all over England (except London) doing fearful and fatal damage″ when recording monthly rainfall measurements for that year.

[5] The next recorded instance is in the March 20, 1936, issue of the Port Arthur News in Texas: "The weather bureau describes the disturbance as 'the perfect storm' of its type.

"[6] In 1993, journalist and author Sebastian Junger planned to write a book about a fishing boat caught in the 1991 Halloween Nor'easter storm.

In the course of his research, he spoke with Bob Case, who had been a deputy meteorologist in the Boston office of the National Weather Service at the time of the storm.