"Nor'easter" -- missing definition? and an antedating

[Bill Palmer]

In my navy career, I spent about 15 years on sea duty, and I have to confess
I rarely heard the term used, and never with any kind of precise meaning, or
applied to any weather event being experienced. Growing up in coastal VA,
the word is used to mean a windstorm, usually accompanied by heavy rain,
and, not surprisingly, blowing in from the NE.

The fact is that, after a couple of very bad experiences in WWII, the Navy
takes extreme measures to make sure its ships avoid extreme weather
conditions, unless operational necessity dictates otherwise.  In my time,
there was a very complete system of gathering weather data, assembling and
analyzing it, and using it to ensure ships were not needlessly hazarded, and
I'm sure it's twice  as sophisticated now. So these days there would be very
few in the navy who would have experienced at sea anything like what
"noreaster" implies.

Bill Palmer

----- Original Message -----
From: "Wilson Gray" <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 8:37 PM
Subject: Re: "Nor'easter" -- missing definition? and an antedating


> ---------------------- Information from the mail
> header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Nor'easter" -- missing definition? and an antedating
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Has anybody here been to sea or know anyone who's been to sea and,
> therefore, might know what contemporary seafarers, at least, say? I
> read Jan freeman's Boston Globe article, which, for me, is the last
> word on the subject of the *word* _nor'easter_.. As it happens, I have
> a brother who spent years on an aircraft carrier and, later, on a
> destroyer, as both EM and officer. Unfortunately it has never occurred
> to me , before now, to ask him about the nor[th]easter, he being of
> somewhat-waspish temperament, with nothing much more than contempt for
> the ignorance of others.
>
> IME from living in Boston, I consider a "nor[th]easter" to be a
> full-blown (no pun intended) storm and not merely a wind. However, I
> have no vested interest in this. So, it's fine with me, if others
> choose to believe otherwise.
>
> WRT "blue norther," Kelli's mention of this storm is the only other
> time that I've come across it, since that time when Sky King and his
> sidekicks were trapped by a snow-bearing one in an episode of the old
> radio show, back in the '40's. There's nothing like that in East
> Texas, just eye-blasting, eardrum-shattering thunderstorms.
>
> There was an odd local(?) belief: if you made any kind of loud noise
> during such a storm, you would call down the lightning onto wherever
> it was that you were sheltering. I recall talking in whispers and
> walking on tip-toe, during such storms. As a child, I really wanted to
> see whether a thunderbolt could actually set a house afire, when it
> was pouring down rain. So, I always kinda hoped that some neighbor
> would make a loud noise and cause his house to be struck by lightning,
> so that I could see whether the crib would consequently burn to the
> ground, despite all the water falling from the sky.
>
> -Wilson
>
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail
>> header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
>> Subject:      Re: "Nor'easter" -- missing definition? and an antedating
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> At 1/19/2010 01:25 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>>Literary? Then how explain customary nautical pronunciations "nor'east,"
>>>"nor'west," "nor'nor'west," etc.?
>>
>> The highly-educated seamen and fishermen of pre-colonial, colonial,
>> and early Republic New England?  :-)
>>
>> Joel
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> -Wilson
> ---
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"--a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org


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