The Bruce Report

A faithful reader writes: “I have enjoyed your column for many years. But I’m wondering why you use so many big words?”

Obviously, I do it to impress the ladies. But that’s not the only reason.

I once began a column about Conrad Black this way: “Now that the loquacious practitioner of prolix prose – that earnest icon of inestimable erudition, that braggart-general of besotted bookishness – is (well, let’s not gild the lily) out of jail, the time has come for Canadians to rally behind their once-fellow citizen and provide him with what he so desperately needs: A job.”

I might have written the passage this way: “Now that the chatty writer – that representative of knowledge, that avid reader – is (well, let’s not gild the lily) out of jail, the time has come for Canadians to rally behind their once-fellow citizen and provide him with what he so desperately needs: A job.”

Still, something important would have been lost in the translation: The homage to Black’s love affair with complex, often arcane, language, which seems to me the grimly humorous part of the fallen media baron’s diminished station in his life behind bars.

Of course, the debate over what makes good writing has been raging (if only at university English departments and in newsrooms) for decades. Somehow, circumlocution (using too many words to express an idea) has been confused with lexicon (the state of a person’s vocabulary).

One of the wisest teachers on the subject was former New York Times editor William Zinsser who wrote, in his seminal work “On Writing Well”: “During the late 1960s the president of a major university wrote a letter to mollify the alumni after a spell of campus unrest. ‘You are probably aware,’ he began, ‘that we have been experiencing very considerable potentially explosive expressions of dissatisfaction on issues only partially related.’

“He meant that the students had been hassling them about different things. I was far more upset by the president’s English than by the students’ potentially explosive expressions of dissatisfaction. I would have preferred the presidential approach taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he tried to convert into English his own government’s memos, such as this blackout order of 1942:

“‘Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal buildings and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination.’

‘Tell them,’ Roosevelt said, ‘that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something across the windows.’”

Although Zinsser clearly preferred shorter words to longer ones, what really bugged him was clutter and bafflegab.

In fact, some of the most beautiful words in English are deliciously multi-syllabic: serendipity, denouement, effervescent and evocative; labyrinthine, lissome, panacea and riparian; ripple, scintilla, susurrous and talisman.

And, occasionally, when it’s not overplayed, latinate diction just seems right. “I noticed how much I love the word abrasive,” writes professional copyeditor Sarah McCartney in a recent blog post. “We could shorten it to rude, but that’s not the same thing. It could be replaced with hard or tough or hurtful or scary or harsh. Still not good enough. Abrasive implies lasting and painful damage from a light, fleeting touch, like scraping your fingers on a brick wall. . .When I’m editing business documents, I do spend a lot of time extracting long words that exist only as insulation for delicate egos. But sometimes the shorter alternative doesn’t quite do the job.”

Indeed, If the job is to be funny, sometimes the shorter word doesn’t even show up for work.

So, with apologies to my faithful reader, I don’t mean to appear obstreperous or abstruse. But my appetency for the appropriate apothegm will continue ad libitum as long as I am able to eschew obfuscation.

Look it up, pal.

Alec Bruce is a Moncton-based writer on politics, economics and current affairs. Check out his other blog here at Atlantic Business Magazine (ABMOnline): The Uneasy Chair.

Words are my occupational hazard. They frequently bug me – even good the ones.

I’m not referring to perfectly serviceable varieties like articles (the, a, an) that provide the connective tissue for meaning. I’m talking about words that, in certain combinations and contexts, are misused, abused or merely over-used. And each year, at around this time, I resolve to cluster a few for jettisoning before the champagne goes flat at the annual warbling of “auld lang syne”.

The mysterious emergence of “so” in all forms of discourse is a case in point. A troubled soul writes to Yahoo: “Has anyone else noticed an overuse of the word ‘so’ to begin sentences, especially among academics and scientists? Is it correct to begin sentences with ‘so’, even though there is no cause-effect relationship with what has been previously said.”

The answer, dear friend, is “no”. But that doesn’t prevent an otherwise educated, articulate person from sounding like a tremulous teenager trying to explain to Pop what happened to his lunch money.

Interviewer: “Are you telling me that the Hadron Collider has produced faster-than-light neutrinos in violation of Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

Interviewee: “So. . .what we’ve seen is still unconfirmed. So. . .it seems possible. So. . .we need to do more empirical work. So. . .that’s where we are.”

So, get on with it (and please shut up). I’m just saying.

Which brings me to another verbal earworm of a phrase.

What do people mean when they pontificate on a subject, then shrug their shoulders and blurt, “I’m just saying”? Are they making excuses for their reasoning? Are they apologizing, after the fact, for their opinions or the forcefulness of their arguments?

Imagine a Supreme Court judge issuing the following edict:

“The defence has not presented a persuasive case for consideration of appeal. The burden of evidence clearly indicates that there was no prosecutorial misconduct in the trial of one Benard “Mauler” Trippleworth. Having been found guilty of armed robbery, common assault, and mass murder, it is the ruling of this court that the original verdict will stand and that said defendant will continue to serve three consecutive life sentences in a maximum security prison. . .I’m just saying.”

In other words, that dog don’t hunt, which is, not incidentally, an expression the online Urban Dictionary defines this way: “An obviously faulty endeavor; also as ~ /won’t hunt/, predictive of failure. A no-go or non-starter. Eg.:  As he faced the blank stares of the members following his proposal, someone whispered off camera, ‘Well. That dog don’t hunt.’”

But, however you define it, there is something profoundly irritating about a phrase that traces its origins to back-woods Arkansas finding near ubiquitous usage in the gilded parlors and granite kitchens of the very wealthy in American society.

Matron: “Lolita, did you clean the fifth bathroom – the one near the pool house?”

Maid: “I was just about to get to it, madam.”

Matron: “Oh, my poor dear. . .I’m afraid that dog don’t hunt.”

This is not how any good “one-percenter” should talk.

Still, the remaining 99 per cent who claim de facto membership in the “Occupy Movement” are in danger of offending the language even more deeply.

Has it occurred to anyone that the term is an oxymoron? How can a thing simultaneously occupy and move? Of course, it is possible to sleep and walk at the same time. Perhaps the new incarnation of the protest next year should be dubbed, “Sleepwalkers Anonymous”. It’s fresher and, in a strange way, more reflective of its purpose and impact.

Fortunately, New Brunswick’s Alward government knows what to do with a bad brand. This year, the provincial Tories unceremoniously dumped the meaningless, and frankly embarrassing, tourism slogan, “Be in this place.”

They did so, they said, after consulting with members of the public – consultations that were, naturally, “extremely inclusive”.

It may be the only time in history when a politician’s “committing to discussing” wasn’t wretched code for “deciding to dither”.

But given the state of emergency that is the provincial bank account, “consultation and inclusiveness” is another phrase we cal ill afford to keep in the breaking, word-challenged days of 2012.

Alec Bruce is a Moncton-based writer on politics, economics and current affairs. Check out his other blog here at Atlantic Business Magazine (ABMOnline): The Uneasy Chair.

I am not what anyone, certainly not my wife, would describe as a comfortable flyer. When I was 14, I was determined to become a pilot, though I had never stepped foot in an airplane. I begged my father to let me accompany him on a business trip. We took off in a snow storm, and landed in a blizzard. It was pitch dark.

I never again entertained the notion of making a living by jetting other people around the world.

A week ago, I climbed aboard a plane bound for Ottawa enroute to London, England. My beloved and I were canned in a metal cylinder for about eight hours each way. No room. Bad food. Shirty flight attendants. Uncertain weather. What was that bump?

Christmas is, to be sure, the oddest time to test the limits of one’s comfort zone. Yet, unaccountably, I was looking forward to the sojourn. If I had a psychiatrist, he might suggest that I have finally overcome my overweening determination to control every aspect of my quotidian existence. But, what do shrinks know?

It’s more likely that I have, in my middle years, come to realize that the older one gets, the more crucial change – any change, large or small – becomes to both mental and physical health.

According to recent research, sitting kills. Here’s what medicalbillingandcoding.org says on the subject: “As soon as you sit, electrical activity in the leg muscles is shut off, calorie burning drops to one per minute, enzymes that help break down fat drop 90 per cent.”

In fact, people who recline on their derrieres more than six hours a day are up to 40 per cent more likely to die within 15 years than those who bum-squat less than three. The stats don’t improve much even if you exercise regularly.

Fully eleven per cent of us are fated to die young because we spend too much time watching television, though given the quality of boob-tube programming such untimely demise may be simply sweet release.

The point is sitting is a metaphor for the spiritual rot that afflicts us.

We receive news of the world through our computer screens and smart phones. We’re more likely to Skype people than meet them. Canadian residents actually made 766,000 trips to overseas countries in October, which sounds like a lot. But it was actually down 2.1 per cent, compared with the previous month.

Still, why should we stand and move? Why should we change, when our perspectives are so thoroughly manipulated by the masters of marketing, politics and economics?

It’s not going to far to suggest that the financial meltdown of 2008 – for which we  are still paying – owed much of its rolling thunder to the millions of people who believed the lies unscrupulous traders and their willing confederates in the banking industry spun about mortgage-backed securities.

We know what we’re talking about, they cooed. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about assuming unsustainable levels of personal debt. Just hand us your credit cards, folks. Relax. Sit.

Neither is it absurd to speculate whether the current crisis in the Eurozone would have assumed the calamitous dimension that it has had some of the member nations pulled themselves up from their recliners and took a good, hard look at what monetary union actually meant to their comfortable, sedentary, entitled citizens.

Of course, sitting in an airplane for the better part of two work days does seem self-contradictory. I console myself by realizing that it’s merely a means to an end. And that end is old London town, which I hadn’t visited in years.

There, we walked everywhere: Across the Millennium Bridge to the Tate Modern; into the country to photograph the Bronze Age Uffington White Horse; through North London, where youthful rioters only recently refused to sit.

And when we returned, we thought about who we met and what we saw. We eyed our bicycles, dreamt about spring and planned another trip.

We kept moving.

Alec Bruce is a Moncton-based writer on politics, economics and current affairs. Check out his other blog here at Atlantic Business Magazine (ABMOnline): The Uneasy Chair.

Doomsday scenarios, those ardent little prognostications that every turn of the year seems to invite, are not testaments to gullibility as much as evidence of indolence. Hell, I can “believe” in almost anything – UFOs, the pearly gates, superior returns on ethical growth funds – when I’m bored.

Every so often, though, a real fish tale of an apocalypse spreads across the Internet like urine in a swimming pool, winning friends and influencing busy, productive people who ought to know better. This year’s winner is: The Mayan long count calendar, which runs down, after 5,100 years, on December 21, 2012.

This arcane chronological oddity, alone, should be sufficient to convince anyone that the “end days” are nigh. But if skeptics need more resonant proof, one “official” website helpfully posits this external link:

“Underwater volcanoes are increasing exponentially. The harmonic tremors are also on a steep rise. A 74,000-year cycle of a devastating super volcano nears as we approach 2012. The December 2004 tsunami epicenter points towards a possible site for the super volcano.”

And this:

“The real cause of climate changes, volcanic activity, intensification of seismic activity etc., is the planet Eris, (which is) getting closer to our solar system. (It was)known in antiquity under various names: Nibiru, Marduk, Nemesis, Hercolubus, the Gods Planet, the Planet of the Empire, the Planet of the Cross or the Red Planet.”

And (sigh) this:

“At one time, the earth was not located in the present position. Mars was located here and had the same makeup as earth. Mars was knocked out of the position where earth is located now while rotating around the sun. Both planets are still in the Milky Way Galaxy. There are many human beings on earth that are presently aware of the many alien humanoid beings due to some have crashed on earth. Some crashes were planned and others were simply accidents.”

Still, the owners of this site are not above engaging in a little motivated self-ridicule, especially if they can make a few bucks:

“Whether by alien Invasion or nuclear war, the humorous and original 2012 sixteen-month wall-calendar makes fun at possible end of the world scenarios. It also touches on current problems plaguing the planet like global warming, oil spills to greed on Wall Street. Whether man-made or natural disasters, the calendar takes a lighthearted look at mankind’s potential downfall. It’s cool, creative and thought provoking!”

It’s also a mere $13.95 (not including shipping). But, hurry before you. . .well, run out of time.

In fact, what tickles me most about the 2012 phenomenon – which claims its “true believers” include luminaries Woody Harrelson, Mel Gibson and Lil’ Wayne – is its wanton and playful disregard for precision.

The world will end in a black hole.

Or maybe it’s a collision with a wandering planet.

Or maybe some sort of “galactic alignment” will do us in.

Then again, it could be a magnetic reversal of the poles, or a giant solar flare, or Donald Trump’s combover spontaneously combusting and igniting all the oxygen in the atmosphere.

It doesn’t matter. All you need know is that something big is going to happen, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Indeed, writes Jonathan McGregor Bethel (who self-identifies as “Writer, Researcher, Lecturer and Founder, Omega Point Institute”), “Whatever the facts are, we need to be creating spiritual ideals and treating the others around us with the kindness we would like to receive, creating a positive morphic thought field and influencing the course of events in a beneficial way. This way, we will be in the best frame of mind to meet any challenges that may arise. If nothing happens, wonderful, we’re all better off with our benevolent behavior!”

And who can argue with that? If more of us had created a “positive morphic thought field” back when Wall Street animals were marauding through the pantries of our retirement funds, we’d all be better off now.

So, then, I don’t mind reflecting, in my idle hours, upon the fate of the earth, crica  December 21, 2012.

It beats contemplating the manmade doomsday our arrogance and spite have already guaranteed.

Alec Bruce is a Moncton-based writer on politics, economics and current affairs. Check out his other blog here at Atlantic Business Magazine (ABMOnline): The Uneasy Chair.

Weh-Ming and I (left) discussing the lighter points of heavy equipment

A few winters ago, in a fit of Christmas cheer, I offended the gods of common sense by giving away a practically new, all-metal-construction snowblower.

Had I lived in Fort Lauderdale, my soft-hearted gesture might have seemed merely unnecessary. But I didn’t live in Fort Lauderdale. I lived in Moncton. I still do, and over the years of record-breaking accumulations, I have come to believe that the decision I made then actually betrays congenital mushiness in the organ located somewhere north of my big mouth.

Until last Sunday.

That’s when I met a man by the name of Weh-Ming Cho, who lives with his wife  in a nicely appointed bungalow in one of the Hub City’s prettier neighbourhoods. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.

About a week ago, after the season’s first, real blast of winter, he posted a squib on the online classified advertising site Kijiji, seeking offers for his snowblower. But it wasn’t just any squib. It was a comedic rant worthy of the late George Carlin writing at his raucously best. It read, in part: “This isn’t some entry level snow blower that is just gonna move the snow two feet away.”

This is an 11 HP Briggs and Stratton machine of snow doom that will cut a 29-inch path of pure ecstasy. And it’s only four years old. I dare you to find a harder working four-year-old. My niece is five and she gets tired and cranky after just a few minutes of shoveling. This guy just goes and goes and goes.”

You know what else? I greased it every year to help keep the water off it and the body in as good a shape as possible. It’s greasier than me when I was 13, and that’s saying something. You know how many speeds it has? Six forward and two reverse. It goes from leisurely slow up to light speed. Seriously, I’ve never gone further than five because it terrifies me.”

Weh-Ming, who now prefers to hire others to move his snow around, explains he was just having some fun. But within hours, something that could only make sense in this Internet-addicted, glued-to-the-blinking-screen age of ours happened. Weh-Ming and his haughty Briggs were getting famous. Everywhere.

Views of the ad jumped from 100 to 1,000, then to 10,000, 50,000, 100,000. By Sunday night, the counter at the bottom of the screed registered more than 300,000 hits. Emails poured in from Europe, New Zealand, the United States. Facebook was on fire. The twitterverse was. . .well, all atwitter, and the mainstream media were muscling for interviews. Who was this guy, and how did he get so funny?

Weh-Ming, who is actually an office worker in real life, graciously complied, chortling merrily for CBC hosts on the regional and national networks. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post gave the ad two thumbs up for hilarity.

I came late to the party, catching wind of the fine fellow’s adventures only after hearing him talk in a radio item late last week. But after checking out his prose online, I recognized a man who had clearly missed his calling. And I began to cogitate.

All my recent efforts to secure a snow-removal contract had come to nothing and I was not looking forward to another winter of sinew-stretching shoveling. My only question was: Why was he selling? He had an answer for that, too.

“I’ll tell you why,” his ad obliged. “Because I heard it was time for you to man up and harness some mighty teeth and claws and chew your way to freedom.”

That was good enough for me, so I sent him an email: “I will buy your snowblower for the listed price, plus the cost of having it shipped over to our place in Moncton. As a professional writer, I think we writer guys ought to stick together on matters of snow jobs!”

He agreed, and the deal was done.

Do I need a snowblower? Yes.

Do I have anywhere to stow it? No.

But when it comes to supporting great scribbling, I believe in putting my money where my big mouth is.

UPDATE: Kudos to Junk-Away Moncton for dropping their cargo, speed-washing their ride and getting their asses in gear just in time to be CTV-filmed taking the fame monster to her new home on the other side of town.

Alec Bruce is a Moncton-based writer on politics, economics and current affairs. Check out his other blog here at Atlantic Business Magazine (ABMOnline): The Uneasy Chair.

Every so often, somebody from my distant past drops me a line, asking me if I’d be willing to return to Toronto and take over some small principality of a metropolitan newsroom. When I laugh derisively and tell him I’d rather hang by my thumbs over a crocodile pit, I can almost hear his jaw hitting the keyboard.

Have more than two decades of rustication in the Canadian outback turned my mind to fish meal? What do I mean by rejecting such a generous offer, the chance to live and work again in the centre of the universe where the grass is ever green, when so many Maritimers are grabbing every opportunity to abandon their unpromising corner of the steppe?

That’s when the wisecracks really start to flow:

“Well, I might consider it once I’ve run out clean air, affordable housing, local food, friendly neighbours, and silent nights. Until then, someone’s got to mend the nets, fix the lobster traps and write the sea shanties you Upper Canadians love so well. Who knows, one of us left behind after the Great Rapture to Hog Town may even discover indoor plumping.”

Invariably, my correspondent is not amused. Indeed, he seems almost offended. It never occurred to him that some denizens of the East Coast actually like where they’re to. They don’t perceive the observable lack of crime, pollution, noise and horse’s arses any hardship.

That’s not to say the region where Confederation was born, where most of the nation’s banks began, is perfect. It has its problems, such as public debt, struggling resource industries, low labour productivity, crumbling municipal infrastructure and a rather unseemly devotion to something called “celtic rock”. But in the big picture of global depredations, these troubles are trifling. We’re lucky, and we know it.

As a 15-year resident of Moncton, N.B., here’s how I count my blessings:

My mayor’s name is George LeBlanc. If I were to return to Toronto, my mayor’s name would be Rob Ford. Enough said.

My house is a 20-minute stroll from downtown (a seven-minute bike ride in a headwind). If I were to find comparable accommodations in the GTA, I would be commuting to work for more than an hour each way, and paying extravagant prices at a parking garage for a car I would have to buy with a line of credit I couldn’t sustain thanks to the upper six-figure mortgage that would be sucking my bank account dry faster than I could replenish it. In the end, I’d most likely have to move down east, claiming economic hardship, which is how I got here in the first place. And I’ve never been a fan of deja vu.

My mechanic is a fine fellow by the name of Jim, who operates a service station on north Mountain Road. The other day, he fixed the transmission in my car. When I went to pay him, he handed me the key and said “no charge”. Dumbfounded, I said “huh?”. Apparently, he thought he should have noticed the leak during a previous inspection and now felt honour bound to give me a free ride, as it were. Where does that happen? Not in the big TO.

My wine guy is a worldly gent named George. And by worldly, I mean he seems to have lived everywhere. Once every couple of months, I head to his shop to bottle some vino, but mostly to get his take on current events, as he is wicked smart. To obtain the same quality of observation and perspicacity in Toronto, I’d have to lay down five-hundred bucks at a Moses Znaimer “Idea City” conference and listen to university professors bleat on about why “work” is inherently evil. Which, of course, it is.

In fact, here on the Atlantic rim, I don’t work; I play. Sometimes, people pay me for it. That’s something else I couldn’t pull in the city of my birth.

Or maybe I could; I just can’t be bothered.

The grass is plenty green right here.

“Is there anything nicer than a weekend in spring?”

That’s what one Globe and Mail Focus-section-factotum recently asked of his devoted readers, who were doubtless breathless from anticipating his answer.

Of course, the answer came.

“Actually, there is,” he chirped in last Saturday’s edition. “A three-day weekend in spring. . .Seventy-two precious hours of freedom. Finish that book on the bedside table. Stroll the park, scour the barbecue, plant the garden. Or, if you’re really ambitious, tackle the clutter in the basement. . .Canadians enjoy five or six of these brief furloughs a year. In fact, they savour them – tonics for the spirit – like bottles of vintage wine.”

But wait, there was more from this rhetorical cellar of ripened pomposity:

“The regular weekend is like a speed bump. It slows you down, but doesn’t last long enough to change your basic habits. Three days, on the other hand, is a legitimate rest. It allows you to reset the psychic thermostat. So here’s the real question du jour: Why aren’t there more of them? What’s so sacred about the five-day workweek, a regimen set in place in North America seven decades ago that has been virtually immoveable since (unlike in many European countries)? In an age of high-tech efficiency and higher productivity, why isn’t the working world organized to provide us with more leisure time?”

Sigh. This would be perfect parody, except for the fact that Globe writers are notoriously incapable of managing this literary device. All that’s left, then, is to parse the meaning of an earnest mind.

Do we actually think that most people in this country reasonably expect a four-day work-week? Do the farmers, foresters, fishers, miners and off-shore oil workers  – you know, the ones who would support extended weekends for the punditry – anticipate time off from the woods, oceans, pits and rigs that pay their families even as these risky activities threaten their lives and livelihoods?

And do we believe for a Toronto minute that 60 percent of the job-generating class in this country – independent entrepreneurs – spend a nanosecond of their time wondering how to beg off work long enough to organize their leisure? Do we understand why they spend years in virtual poverty? Can we reckon the enormous sacrifice they make of their souls simply by not being around for their families and friends – at weddings, births, confirmations, graduations, mitzvahs – to grist the mill and keep the wheels turning year after year?

What’s a rustication to them, except an excuse to wither?

Is there anything nicer than a three-day weekend in spring?

Try these bromides instead:

“If you live for weekends or vacations, your shit is broken.”

“Go big, or go home.”

“Most people have attained their success one step beyond failure.”

“To win without risk is to triumph without glory.”

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

That last quote was from Mark Twain, who made three fortunes in his lifetime and lost them all by making the main chance, grabbing for the brass ring, and otherwise risking it all on something other than an opportunity to catch up on his reading, snoozing, gardening, strolling, grilling and household organizing.

He died both rich and happy, knowing that there are many things nicer than a spring day. There is faith and fortitude. There is determination and decision. There is the  sound of your child who says she misses your face even when it’s five degrees in the shade and you don’t know when or how to sow in the next generation gratitude for a hard, scrabbling life that purchases a three-day weekend for the foolish, frivolous and eternally fortunate.

Once, early on in my part-time career as a government writer, I submitted a report the subject of which has altogether slipped my mind. (A failing memory does occasionally have its rewards). But I do recall my supervisor’s critique:

“Not bad at all. It’s accurate, comprehensive and to the point. But I’m wondering if you can make it, you know, more bureaucratic.”

By “bureaucratic” he meant “cluttered”. In this particular branch of the public service, the rule was: Never use one word when three or four would do. So, a sentence like “The sun is shining” should properly read “It was observed that overcast conditions were not prevalent.”

For anyone trained as I was, in the homes of professional journalists and news rooms of major media, this was not only silly, but downright dangerous to meaning. Or, as New York Times Editor William Zinsser once observed, “Clutter is the ponderous euphemism that turns a slum into a depressed socioeconomic area, a salesman into a marketing representative, a dumb kid into an underachiever and garbage collectors into waste disposal personnel. In New Canaan, Conn., the incinerator is now the ‘volume reduction plant.‘ I hate to think what they call the town dump.”

The refuse containment, compaction and separation facility, perhaps?

Of course, as at least one of any government’s main objectives is to confuse people about its policies (the very essence of the horrible phrase “plausible deniability”), clutter is a crucial literary device.

Still, not always.

Back in 1942, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt received the following memo about blackouts from one if his functionaries:

“Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal buildings and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination.”

The Commander-in-Chief replied thusly: “Tell them that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something across the windows.”

Now, the Obama administration seems ready to tear a page from FDR’s primer. Its new Federal Plain Language Guidelines makes the case for simplicity and clarity in public sector communications. “Words matter,” it states starkly. “They are the most basic building blocks of written and spoken communication. Choose your words carefully – be precise and concise.”

It goes on to stipulate, “The active voice makes it clear who is supposed to do what. It eliminates ambiguity about responsibilities. Not ‘It must be done’, but ‘You must do it’. The passive voice obscures who is responsible for what and is one of the biggest problems with government documents. Don’t confuse the passive voice with the past tense. In an active sentence, the person or agency that’s acting is the subject of the sentence. In a passive sentence, the person or item that is acted upon is the subject of the sentence. Passive sentences often do not identify who is performing the action.”

According to an Associated Press report, the new rules are mandatory: “Obama signed the Plain Writing Act last fall after decades of effort by a cadre of passionate grammarians in the civil service to jettison the jargon. It takes full effect in October, when federal agencies must start writing plainly in all new or substantially revised documents produced for the public. Bad writing by the government, says White House information and regulation administrator Cass Sunstein, discourages people from applying for benefits they should get, makes federal rules hard to follow and wastes money because of all the time spent. . .explaining things to a baffled populace.”

How does the Government of Canada stack up?

Here’s a tidbit from its online language portal:

“It’s easy to become dogmatic about passive voice, to thump our desks and insist on purging every instance of it from our writing. Indeed, some writers go to extraordinary lengths to do just that, with little regard to context or flow. Truly understanding passive voice means acknowledging that there’s room for it in clear writing – if we use it sparingly, and for a particular effect.”

It is to be acknowledged that the point is arguable.

But, I say poppycock.

Somewhere underneath that wall of white, that cement-brick-back-breaking-shovelling-son-of-a-gun-global-warming-denying mass of frozen water, is life. Somewhere underneath it all is a flower.

I know, because I planted one before the last ice age. In fact, I planted precisely 565 bulbs, plus my usual 20 rows of winter garlic, in October when green was more than a gleam in a Mastodon’s eye.

I hired a man to climb onto my roof, 60-feet from what used to be pavement, in 60-kilometer gusts, to clear five feet of snow and ice. He was down with the flu, but he felt obligated as I had paid him in advance. “Man,” he said, “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s like the sky opened up.”

And God forgot to turn off the faucet.

Where once there were columbine, clematis, roses, cone flowers, rudbeckia, and ten varieties of Asian lilies in my back garden, there is now a monotonous gleam under the blue moonlight of dread.

And yet, no, not this.

Shakespeare was “discontented” with this season. George Bernard Shaw described it as “simply ridiculous”. Oscar Wilde wanted to know where he could go to get his money back, having spent a month in Cornwall when the winds blew his January hat from his oversized head.

Others have had this to say:

“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.” (Andrew Wyeth)

“There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you. In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.” (Ruth Stout)

“Winter is nature’s way of saying, ‘Up yours.’” (Robert Byrne)

Certainly, but for me, winter is nature’s way of saying, “Remember”.

Remember when you pined for a snow day from school and for toboggans and skates? Remember the forts you built in banks with your pals? Remember the battles you waged over the turrets of your perfect ice castles?

Remember when you were that young to understand that the world was full of hope and promise and hot chocolate by the fires of your imagination?

In the dead of winter, when we were children, my sister and I would come alive, reading aloud tales of impossible adventures to each other, turning our younger brother’s rocking horse into a drum set, transforming a lacrosse stick into a guitar, and making a microphone out of an eight-track player.

Later, my young wife and I would sit by the T-V in the February cold and debate the meaning of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” series, and the merits of Dick Cavett’s pretentious, but entertaining, PBS talk show. If we had some money (which we rarely did), we’d put in a call, as the winds howled and the snow drifted, and pledged it to MPBN like long-lost family who just got wise to little Timmy’s imminent demise. We’d go to bed knowing that we had, at least once, saved the world from the malign forces of Mordor, or whatever else we were reading at the time.

Winter was reflection, and reflection was winter in the cold play of our minds and bodies in an unforgiving climate we forgave easily and joyfully as children. Somewhere in those quiet flights of fancy and sudden bursts of generosity, and under all that wall of white, we became human beings.

And now the man is gone from my roof, happy to be home with his wife and children, his job well done, waiting for the next storm, looking for a job.

Somewhere, from his vantage and underneath it all, a flower grows.