Q:

What does "this design sucks like an inverted hurricane" mean?

Martin Fowler in his Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture says: "this design sucks like an inverted hurricane". I can't get the last part. What does the "inverted hurricate" mean in this context? Or is this an untranslatable idiom?

A:

A hurricane is a vast spinning storm that produces powerful winds that blow out from its centrifugal force.  This is the opposite of something that sucks things into itself.  To get a storm that sucked (literally), you'd need the opposite (figuratively) of a hurricane.  Which would be an inverted (totally turned inside out) hurricane.

