When does strongest not mean strongest?

Does this make sense to anyone else? If it's tied with another hurricane then it isn't the strongest.

Odile was the strongest hurricane on record to hit the Baja Peninsula, tied with Hurricane Olivia of 1967

It's on Dr. Jeff Masters blog at Weather Underground (http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2800) and he's repeated it at least once, so it seems to make sense to him.

The short answer is "yes". It does make sense to most people although I can see your point.
Perhaps he should have said something like "Odile was one of the strongest hurricanes on record to hit the Baja Peninsula, along with Hurricane Olivia of 1967" although I can see some would quibble at that. Can't help feeling that language is about communicating and if an addiction to pedantry leads to longer and more convoluted sentences then I'm not sure that's a good thing.

It just seems wrong to me. To read that this hurricane is the strongest I expect it to be strongest bar none, and then to read that another hurricane was the same strength is jarring. I would have written it as "Odile is tied for the strongest hurricane to hit Baja with Olivia of 1967".

Yes I can see what you mean. A couple of weeks ago I was reading the section in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language ( https://www.librarything.com/work/27365/111192185 ) on expressions such as "very unique" or "very pure" which are often targetted by us pedants. I find I'm slowly softening in my attitude to such things and going with the flow. Couldn't get touchstones to work although I see it in quite a lot of LT libraries.

Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

Works for me. Did you put square brackets around the title?

It's like saying both teams won when they actually tied.

>5 jjwilson61:: Yes. And ditto to #6

It's like a horrible phrase I keep hearing on television and radio: "one of the only". What the presenters mean is "one of the very few".