With news that storms are forming in the mid-Atlantic, the dreaded cliche season is upon us. A cliche, by the way, is any word that gets used so many times it no longer means anything. It is repeated again and again until we no longer hear it.

We become like people who live in the flight path of big airports and fail to hear the 747s roaring overhead. Strung together, cliches become the verbal equivalent of mush, or cream of wheat or elevator music.

Unfortunately, local TV weather forecasters seem incapable of speaking in anything other than cliches. It doesn’t matter which station, and it doesn’t really matter whether the forecaster is working locally, at CNN headquarters in Atlanta or standing in a wind-whipped parking lot with gas station canopies lifting off around them.

They all seem to have attended Storm Center University in Breathless, Minnesota. There, they are provided with a vocabulary list of about 22 words. From that point forward, almost any weather event from a tsunami to a sunset can be described by combining words from the list. Weather forecasters and reporters would, we fear, be left speechless if they were deprived of their favorite tropical storm cliches.

For instance, in weather-speak, tropical storms and hurricanes always “bear down” on a mysterious place on the coast called “landfall.” They do not merely approach, of course. That’s admittedly bland. But why couldn’t storms just as easily gyrate toward, spin into or tear into their target?

Local weather people don’t even try anymore. They have done the storm story so many times that storm cliches just tumble from their mouths without apparent connection to what is actually happening.

To the weather readers, unfortunate coastal residents faced with a “bearing-down” storm can either “flee in the face of” or “brace.”

Fleeing is a perfectly good word, but why is it always coupled with “in the face of?” And why is that exact combination of words used over and over and over?

Why can’t people dash, scramble or, if you prefer complete accuracy in reporting, simply get into their cars, get on the highway and sit in very slow-moving traffic until they run out of gas?

And bracing? Just how does a person brace? You can, of course, brace yourself for short periods, like when your car is about to smack into the back end of a pickup truck that stopped while you were fiddling with the radio.

Often, however, the storm in question is hundreds of miles away and bracing for hours on end would be painful and impractical.

When you think about it, most people seem far too busy to brace themselves. They are usually dashing madly about in their cars trying to buy up all available generators, bottled water, toilet paper and plywood. Or they are trying to dodge the ubiquitous weather interviewer. They are not “bracing” at all, unless it is in preparation to spin 360 degrees and plant a fist on Anderson Cooper’s kisser.

These are the people who are determined, in weather speak, to “ride out the storm.” Ride out the storm? Maybe if they are on a boat or on horseback. Most people, we suspect, do their storm riding from a recliner in their living room, praying the roof over their heads doesn’t suddenly separate from the walls.

Then, of course, there’s the period after the storm, known in TV weather-person parlance as the “aftermath.” That’s when people end their vigil of bracing and try to “come to grips” with all the shingles, palm trees and gas station canopies littering their lawns.

It is also when storm survivors get to turn the tables on the TV weather interviewers: “What did it sound like,” they are asked.

“A freight train,” they always say. Never a passenger train or a coal train. Never a train loaded with sardines, bananas and soy bean oil. Never a subway or a monorail.

Just once we’d like to hear that it sounded like a wounded, screaming Godzilla pushing a giant Hoover sweeper through a bandsaw the size of a cruise ship.

Just once.