Snow day 7

At seven o’clock yesterday morning the snow had stopped briefly, with about three inches or so of new snow topping the old accumulation. By eight the storm had resumed, and it kept going for another eleven hours. Heavy snow, whipped horizontally by high winds.

At times during the day I just sat, looking out the window and marveling. We are used to the idea of making plans and taking action; there is, we think, always something we can do. Not yesterday. Most of the state simply shut down. Travel on the roads was forbidden, you couldn’t get anywhere, and there was nothing much to go to anyhow. Noting to do but wait until the storm had spent itself.

J.P. did go out in the morning to clear the walks, and I did a turn in late afternoon. Today we’ll finish up the walks and see what, if anything, can be done about the street. But no plow ever appeared on Plymouth or Roselawn, and there are places where the snow has drifted three feet deep on the street. Our cars are not leaving the garage for some time, and we’ll have to see what kind of bus service will be restored. And when.

Fortunately, the power did not fail, so I was able to pass the first day of my sixtieth year — sounds worse than fifty-nine, doesn’t it? — comfortably.

I blogged a bit and got a good start on David Nokes’s biography of Jonathan Swift. I indulged in a wee dram or two of the good bourbon.

I tinkered some with this year’s grammarnoir series, “Pulp Diction.” The first installment will go up later today, followed by weekly installments and concluding on March 4, National Grammar Day.

I spent some time on Facebook, reading a steady stream of birthday greetings and good wishes from far-flung friends and fans, for which I am touched and deeply grateful.

Kathleen and J.P. collaborated on the birthday dinner. J.P. put together a casserole from available materials: ham, rice, peas, asparagus, cheddar cheese, and an improvised sauce tinged with horseradish. Kathleen labored over an apple-cranberry pie, a remnant of which I am about to tuck into for breakfast. We toasted the day with prosecco and afterward settled down to a quiet evening, grateful that the snow had finally come to a halt.

Today, the digging out begins again.

Sometimes they just make it up

When some university finds a donor with more cash than sense to underwrite a Jayson Blair Chair of Journalism, qualified candidates will not be hard to find, but Renee Petrina, who teaches journalism at Ball State, has found a student whose career shows real promise:

Student whining today that my class is hard also points out that “I just make up my sources for my other classes and no one cares” and that she wants to keep her GPA up. Other students note to her that it's probably not the best plan to tell the prof that you cheat.

The student in question, she says, is a 21-year-old junior or senior.

A previous note illustrated Ms. Petrina’s standards of classroom decorum:

Answered a student's cell phone that rang in my class today. Next time I will offer to text their friends.

Not entirely surprising that some students are less than enthusiastic:

Got student evaluations of my teaching back (from last semester). A lot were good. The best, though, said I needed therapy and that all my assignments come from “a dark place.”

I wish I got evaluations like that.

Ms. Petrina was a Penn Stater who got away before I could get a chance to try to hire her at The Sun — which would have been a decidedly mixed blessing for her. As it was, there was a certain bumpiness in her career before her arrival in Muncie:

The person who laid me off from my old job just saw my nice, big office. With my name on the window.

Living well remains the most satisfactory revenge.

Getting the range

Angela Hopp has written on Twitter to inquire about false ranges, a gimmick to which journalists are unfortunately addicted.

To have a proper range, you must have some scale of comparable things with an upper and lower limit, or a set of individual things of the same type. True ranges are all around us:

In Baltimore today, with a blizzard in progress, the range of temperatures is predicted to be 23 degrees Fahrenheit to 29 degrees Fahrenheit.

The stock expression for a dinner with a full set of courses is from soup to nuts, appetizer to the last nibbles.

Samuel Johnson opens The Vanity of Human Wishes with this couplet: Let observation with extensive view, / Survey mankind, from China to Peru. ... That is, there is a geographic range of — to English eyes — exotic lands, the whole world encompassed.

The cruise ship you wish you were on instead of snowbound in Baltimore offers a range of amusements: gambling, overeating, faux-Vegas shows, shopping for overpriced items, overeating, swimming, and on. All of them are part of a limited set of similar activities.

Dorothy Parker commented on the emotional range in a performance by Katharine Hepburn, saying that the actress had “run the whole gamut from A to B.”

A journalist who merely wants to indicate a collection of miscellaneous things will often express that as a false range.

From USA Today: A pair of teenagers downloading songs by artists ranging from OutKast to Billy Joel through an Internet file-sharing service could cost their bewildered parents up to $4,000. Identify, please, the fixed points of songwriting on which OutKast and Billy Joel are parts of a continuum. The writer means as diverse as.

More of the same “as diverse as” false ranges from diverse publications: Products made with nanotechnology -- ranging from sunscreens to socks -- are being sold to consumers without adequate scientific research or regulation, British scientists warned.

A federal judge rebuffed an effort by media organizations, ranging from the Associated Press to Wired News, to unseal whistleblower documents in a civil rights group’s case against AT&T for allegedly helping the government’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

The Tisch family, known for making bets on out-of-favor assets ranging from oil tankers to cigarette makers, acquired a $63 million stake in the New York Times Co.

The changing geography of poverty here reflects a national trend, and argues for a more regional strategies on issues ranging from social safety nets to mass transit. (A pity that the superfluous a was not deleted from this Baltimore Sun article.)

The uncompromising Bill Walsh has written on this subject, pointing out that the false range is a crutch for lazy writers. And, he rightly says, even if you are not a purist about the meaning of range, you must concede that this is a tired device.

Snow day 6

When I woke at six o’clock, the snow had stopped, having deposited three inches or so overnight, but now it has resumed, and we are apparently to feel the brunt of the storm through the day. So far, the power has not failed.

Some events to date:

Item: Yesterday afternoon, with Diana in the cat carrier, Alice and Kathleen close behind, I made my way past the Value City furniture van stuck in the snow at the end of the block, and over to Laurelton, where Alice’s ride back to Garrison Forest School waited. Both daughter and cat are warm and secure in the dormitory.

Item: Elizabeth Large announced her impending retirement as restaurant critic and blogger at The Baltimore Sun. Dining@Large, which will cease publication, has been a remarkable success, on some days outdrawing the paper’s sports blogs, and establishing a rare community of articulate and entertaining readers. They are called the Sandbox, which did not please everyone, but you go with the nickname you have, not the nickname you want.

Elizabeth was one of my favorite colleagues at The Sun, someone with whom it was a pleasure to talk about food or blogging or the personalities in the newsroom and or the essential looniness of the newspaper business in its last days. Her good humor was unfailing, even when she was hard pressed. No one better deserves the ease of retirement, and no one will be more missed.

Item: Of course, amid the outpouring of affection and regard in the comments on her announcement, there was one jarring note. Someone writing as “Sadie” commented:

Happy for you but frankly i'm not sad. It was clear that you weren't happy with your job - it was increasingly rare for you to treat us to an actual review rather than asking your readership to do your job for you by writing about our own experiences. The point of a professional reviewer is to share with us your vast knowledge of cuisine etc. I don't care what Joe down the street thinks - You are paid to use your expertise and review restaurants. Maybe the Sun will be able to find a reviewer who will enjoy their job, actually review restaurants and possibly come close to what the Post has in Tom Sietsema.

Those who have actually read the newspaper are aware that Elizabeth has maintained her standard schedule of reviews without faltering. The blogging, including posts on her days off and during vacations, was in addition to her reviews and articles for the print edition. Further, Sadie appears not to understand what a blog is and how it works.

Thus she illustrates that characteristic feature of the Internet, the combination of ignorance with effrontery.

Happily, some Sandbox regulars, in the self-policing that has been a notable feature of Dining@Large, called Sadie to account. Shut up, they explained.

Item: As I walked back to the house after seeing Alice off, I got a telephone call informing me that I had been passed over for another job. After nine and a half months out of work, this no longer strikes me as a momentous event.

Item: Today, as several people have discovered on Facebook, is my fifty-ninth birthday. A bottle of prosecco is chilling in the refrigerator, and we will open it at dinner to toast the years past and the years ahead. Unemployment and THE WHITE DEATH FROM THE SKY have not done me in.

Snow day 5

Now it begins to get interesting.

After two days of sunshine, the sky has clouded over, and Baltimore braces for the impending storm, which is forecast to bring another foot to foot and a half of snow by the end of the day tomorrow.*

J.P. and I hoofed it to the nearest grocery, three-quarters of a mile, to get milk and other supplies yesterday afternoon. Hamilton Avenue was in indifferent shape, with about a lane and a half partially cleared, and people and vehicles sharing the street.

We came upon a commercial van that had lodged in a snow bank, which a 70-year-old neighborhood resident was helping to get clear. J.P. and I and another pedestrian put our shoulders to it but were unable to move it either backward or forward. We trudged on as the older gentleman went for a shovel.

He was there when we returned, and the van was gone. When the van was clear, he said, he told the woman driving it that he would get it out. He accelerated out of the snow bank, and the van wouldn’t stop, so he threw it into reverse and stopped it. “Lady,” he said, “you don’t have any brakes!”

“I know,” she answered. “That’s why I’m trying to get home.”

As we returned to Plymouth Road, we saw a crowd of neighbors shoveling away at the Plymouth-Roselawn intersection. The neighborhood requests for a city plow have still produced no results, so residents’ only recourse is to come out and try to clear the street manually, like a bunch of babushkas clearing Red Square with twig brooms.

It should be superfluous to say that another foot of snow or more will isolate this neighborhood even further. The block of Roselawn between Plymouth and Pioneer, onto which our garage opens, still has the original two feet of unplowed snow. Anyone on the premises today is likely to be here until sometime next week.

That is why Kathleen has made arrangements with a friend to drive by the nearest open street and pick up Alice to ferry her back to Garrison Forest School. The school is closed today, but Alice is a dorm parent and will be needed to help keep the resident students occupied. Moreover, she will need to be there whenever the school reopens.

So we are charging up the cell phones and the laptops against the hazard of a power failure and making sure that the shovels are at the back door. (Some teens walked through the neighborhood the other day stealing shovels from people’s porches.)

In the middle of all this, a telephone call came for Kathleen yesterday afternoon: Elizabeth Kahl, the senior warden at Trinity Church, had been found dead in her home by neighbors alarmed at not having heard from her. She had apparently expired while sitting up reading.

Dispatches will resume tomorrow, provided there is no blackout.



*New Yorkers and Michiganders, hold your scorn. I was an undergraduate at Michigan State, and in one of my six winters in Syracuse we had more than 160 inches of snow for the season. But Baltimore lacks the equipment to deal with storms of this magnitude, and the way the citizenry drives in snow is terrifying — either 10 mph with the flashers on or 50 mph as if an SUV conferred immortality. If you were here, you would be as apprehensive as I am.

Snow day 4

The situation: Many of the neighbors were out in the sunlight yesterday afternoon, beginning to dig out their cars and clear sidewalks. But Plymouth Road remains largely impassable. Trucks and SUVs have shouldered through a rough path, but last night a smaller, lighter, lower car got stuck half a dozen times and had to be dug out before it could bounce down to the end of the street.

I cleared the drive between the garage and the street — Roselawn — yesterday morning, but Roselawn is entirely untouched. There is no hope of getting a car from the garage to one of the main streets. Neighbors have called 311 requesting plow service from the city, and I have filed an electronic request, but it’s doubtful that any city truck will get here anytime soon.

Meanwhile, another storm is headed this way, with significant accumulation possible Tuesday night and Wednesday. We may have to slog through the drifts to the grocery today or tomorrow to replenish supplies, assuming that the grocery has itself been replenished.

Historical note: It was on February 8, 1980 that I reported to the newsroom of The Cincinnati Enquirer at its old offices in the Enquirer Building on Vine Street, the one with the medallion of the naked printer set into the lobby floor, to begin a three-week tryout on the copy desk. Jim Schottelkotte, the managing editor, had decided to take a chance on me.

Bill Trutner, a sweet man, was the slotman, and Bob Johnson was the old-school news editor. Phil Fisher sat on the rim, as did two recent hires, Jan Cordaro, now Jan Leach of Kent State’s journalism school, and John Bryan, now retired from the Los Angeles Times. It was exhilarating, and it was the start of nearly thirty fun-filled years of copy desk work.

Snow day 3

Reports are trickling in of the existence of readers who profess to enjoy this Snowpocalypse journal and want more of it. Perhaps they are having me on, as the Brits say.

Speaking of the Brits, You Don’t Say notes with sadness the death last week at age 89 of Ian Carmichael, the gifted British comedy actor who, in a long career on stage, in films, and on television, notably portrayed Bertie Wooster in adaptations of P.G. Wodehouse novels and Lord Peter Wimsey in adaptations of Dorothy Sayers’s mysteries. To have given innocent pleasure to so many for so long is one of the happiest of epitaphs.

In local entertainment news, we at 5516 Plymouth Road have been working through the complete Freaks and Geeks, which Kathleen bought at Barnes and Noble on the eve of the storm after she saw more than fifty people in line at one of the few remaining Blockbusters. I commend it to you as a salutary reminder not to grow nostalgic about high school.

The snow ceased about four o’clock yesterday afternoon, leaving us with an accumulation of twenty-four to twenty-six inches. We have cleared and kept clear the walk from the front door to the street and the front sidewalk, and also a path from the rear door to the garage. Shortly, instead of plunging into the fun of explaining paregmenon,* I will shoulder shovel and begin the work of clearing the snow between the garage and the street.

Mayor Rawlings-Blake has tweeted this morning that the city plows will begin clearing the secondary streets by midday. That does not leave me optimistic, because we have not seen a plow on Plymouth Road more than two or three times in the past twenty-two years. I will be surprised if we can get to a clear street by Tuesday.

Supplies are holding out. Potato-leek soup and tuna melt for lunch yesterday, chicken with white sauce and broccoli with farfalle at dinner. The goal, since eating is one of our principal activities, appears to be to create tasty meals while dirtying every pot and utensil in the kitchen. I leave it to you to guess who has scullery duty.

At Trinity Episcopal in Towson and Memorial Episcopal in Bolton Hill, a few sturdy parishioners are trudging through the drifts to read Morning Prayer in the absence of the clergy. Here, the family is sleeping in, the cats are dozing still, and all are warm and secure.



*Paregmenon is a figure of speech in which a word or its cognates are repeated in a short sentence: Youth is wasted on the young. Now you know.

Snow day 2

Woke in the middle of the night to the sound of thunder amid the snowfall. No trace at 7.a.m. of the three shovelings from the night before. Easily two feet of snow on the ground — likely more, though drifting makes measurement difficult. Some permanent damage evident on the holly tree in the yard. Snow wet and dense, flung by periodic wind gusts. Second low system moving out of Kentucky and headed this way.

Cleared a path from the front door to the street, and K. and I tunneled from the back door to the garage. Not that either car could proceed in snow this deep, and the prospects of seeing a city plow on Plymouth and Roselawn are nil. Will wake J.P. later to put him to work on the sidewalk. Two neighbors wielding shovels but no one else on the street.

Started the dishwasher and the laundry to get as much done as possible in case the power goes out. K.’s banana-nut muffins warm from the oven. TV news interspersing warnings — do not attempt to drive anywhere except in an emergency — and the comical — reporter standing out in the snow picks up a handful to show us what it’s like. Bless his heart, everybody within his viewing area knows what it looks like. Mayor tweeting that there are 137 trucks on the road plowing and salting. Shout-out to my former Sun colleagues housed in a hotel up the hill from Calvert Street so they can continue to put out the news.

Coffee and bourbon holding out. J.P.’s chilis last night — one beef, one veg — highly satisfactory. Today perhaps a good day to bake bread. Salmon for dinner tonight. Morale remains good. Cats dozing.

No rehearsal of the Cabinet scene from Annie today, likely no church tomorrow. Seventeen more damn articles on usage issues and figures of speech to write and a book manuscript to finish editing.

Holding steady.

Snow day

We have coffee and bourbon. The snow shovels are propped by the door, and J.P. is poised to spell me with them. I have picked up Alice and her cat, Diana, from Garrison Forest School. Scout and Graymalkin are dozing as the barometer falls. Kathleen is out picking up whatever last-minute things are on her list as we await THE WHITE DEATH FROM THE SKY. When she returns, the whole family will be here to ride out the storm.

Snow hysteria is evident. As I was driving to pick up Alice and Diana, I saw a multi-car pileup on the inner loop of the Beltway at Perring Parkway — a multi-car pileup in daylight on a dry road. So the people who are rushing to escape the storm or make the last-minute trip to strip the grocery stores are getting edgy.

The predicted twenty to twenty-eight inches could maroon us on Plymouth Road for days. So be assured, you clients who are expecting me to complete freelance projects for you, I will have little else to do.

No man's land

Alexandra D’Arcy, a sociolinguist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, takes a hearty swipe at prescriptivists ⎯ her grandmother among them ⎯ in the first installment of a monthly column at Oxford University Press’s OUPblog.

Her grandmother was old-school old school:

In the proud tradition of language purists, Grandmother found anything other than ‘the standard’ objectionable. But it was not only ‘bad’ grammar that bothered her. Slang, jargon, and meanings with which she was unfamiliar were also irksome. This is because, true to her prescriptivist heart, she firmly believed that any linguistic change was a bad thing. When my History of the English Language professor observed that the distinction between lay and lie was being lost among younger speakers (good luck asking a twenty-year-old to run the paradigms), I had the poor enough judgment to share this insight with Grandmother. Since I could never keep straight what was laying and who was lying, this was a lesson that resonated with me. I might as well have told her that going out in public without a bra had become the vogue. She was outraged. She demanded the name of my professor and vowed to phone the head of the department to extract an explanation: How could such as esteemed establishment, her own alma mater no less, employ such a reckless (and feckless) individual? Surely this professor was no academic!

Professor D’Arcy, though, is the very model of a modern sociolinguist:

I describe language as actually used and I revel in the differences and variations of language in practice. Despite my proud ancestry, there is no place for prescription in my world. The notion of should does not apply. … Grandmother taught me to revere the spoken word. I do. She taught me to heed not only the content but also the form. I do. She also taught me that not everybody speaks the same way. And it is this fundamental truth that makes me excited to go to work every day.

So please don’t watch your words. To quote a friend, ‘I like the way you talk.’

I enjoy a false dichotomy as much as the next man ⎯ you may remember a few posts back when I criticized an overly ingenious Washington Post headline, one reader complained I was advocating dull, flat-footed headlines, as if that were the only possible alternative. So I am happy to tuck in to Professor D’Arcy’s.

No doubt her grandmother, that starchy peever, would level a charge of heresy against me for some of my posts and demand that I be turned over to the secular arm. No doubt her granddaughter would turn her gimlet eye on me for my presuming to advise people on how to write. Here I am, neither fish nor fowl.

I, like Professor D’Arcy, like the way you talk. And write. Generally. As I have told you before, I don’t care how you talk in conversation, or how you write in e-mail, how you tweet on Twitter, or how you text friends and family. Not my business. Should you contribute to the richness of the English language, I salute you.

Should you write for publication, I, like Professor D’Arcy’s grandmother, have some standards in mind, though much more flexible ones. I’ve written about the rules of standard written English, conventions of American standard written English that are not actually rules, guidelines for writing effectively in that dialect, and superstitions that get in the way of clarity and directness of expression. I am, as I have repeatedly asserted, a moderate and reasonable prescriptivist, with the milk of human kindness by the quart in every vein, and I do not hesitate to give you my best advice about what you should do within that limited range of the language.

When you visit here, that is what you get.

Welcome to the middle ground.


A NOTE: Not that you have been counting, but this is my 1,000th post since beginning this blog in December 2005. Though the first 704 of them are no longer accessible at Baltimoresun.com, I will continue to resurrect and revise some of that material here, so long as the repetition does not bore you utterly.