What's in a name? Frankenstorm vs. Sandy

• The name Frankenstorm was created just yesterday
• Sandy is the official name from the National Hurricane Center
• Both are trending equally on Twitter

What do you get when you mix a huge hurricane with another big storm, add a full moon, and sprinkle in Halloween? Frankenstorm!

The name came, unexpectedly, from James Cisco, a forecaster with the typically staid federal government's Hydrometeorological Prediction Center (now there's a catchy name!) in College Park, Md.

Cisco first used the name Thursday afternoon in an online report:

The winds from Sandy, he wrote, will be "incorporated into a hybrid vortex over the mid-Atlantic and Northeast next Tuesday." This "unusual merger…should settle back toward the interior Northeast through Halloween, inviting perhaps a ghoulish nickname for the cyclone along the lines of 'Frankenstorm,' an allusion to Mary Shelley's Gothic creature of synthesized elements."

Hybrid vortex! That's almost as cool as Frankenstorm.

And where did the name Sandy come from? Well, Sandy is the "S" storm in the regular rotation of Atlantic hurricane names, selected years ago by the World Meteorological Organization. If it does the damage that's predicted, this name will certainly be retired, as are the names of all major, destructive hurricanes.

Frankenstorm, however, will now likely go into the popular lexicon as did previous monster storms Snowmageddon, Snowpocalypse and Snowtober.

More people have mentioned Sandy than Frankenstorm on Twitter, according to Sara Babiarz, Gannett's social media analyst. However, she says that Frankenstorm mentions have seen a big spike since 7:00 a.m. today.

Despite its popularity, though, Frankenstorm is in no way an official name, reports James Franklin, branch chief of the National Hurricane Center. Sandy is the official name, and it always will be, he says, in all bulletins from the center.

This will be the case even once Sandy moves ashore and is no longer a hurricane: At that time, Franklin says, it will be referred to as "Post-tropical Cyclone Sandy."

Too bad it didn't hit closer to Christmas ... "Sandy Claus" anyone?