Monica Madeja of NBC Boston News reported last year on a word that’s new to me but seems (unfortunately) useful enough it should spread:
We see it over and over again, trucks stuck or smashed on the roads along the Charles River. Simply put they’re “storrowed.” A phrase that’s become so common, it’s become a part of the vernacular in the Boston area.
“One of the great things about the English language is how incredibly flexible it is,” said Dr. Mary Dockray-Miller an English and Humanities professor at Lesley University in Cambridge. Dr. D, as her students call her, examines the way we talk and says people take pride in words that define where they’re from … especially in Boston. “We’re Bostonian,” she said, “We know what this means we use it. And in doing so in a way we’re making fun of all those outsiders who are actually the ones who are doing the storrowing.”
The state is trying to stop the messes and embarrassment that result when a driver isn’t paying attention on roads with low bridges, so they’ve put up new, reflective “cars-only” signs around troublesome areas like Storrow Drive.
Via MetaFilter, where you can see a photo of a massive wind turbine blade knocked off a truck on Route 1 in Maine.
It seems likely to me that this problem will be solved or at least reduced to a very minimum number of cases soon by toggles in apple and google maps allowing truck drivers to generate routes based on their vehicle height.
But yeah, it’s a good word. It sounds right for its meaning somehow.
I totally thought it was a portmanteau of store + sorrow, but couldn’t make sense of it until I read to the end of the post.
It seems likely to me that this problem will be solved or at least reduced to a very minimum number of cases soon by toggles in apple and google maps allowing truck drivers to generate routes based on their vehicle height.
But the driver in question was following the correct route; they simply went under the bridge wrong. You’ll never get rid of human error.
Are you sure? That doesn’t look to be the case with the truck pictures in the article, which is simply too tall for the clearance. Are there other bridges over Storrow where one lane has a lower clearance than the other? Or what would it mean for the “correct” route to allow someone to go a bridge “wrong”?
I once saw a truck go under a bridge on an arterial street in Chicago. It was just barely too tall, and that made it absolutely terrifying. Instead of stopping the truck, the bridge sliced a 40-foot sliver of metal from the length of the upper corner of the truck box’s frame. But didn’t sever it, so this sliver hung in a long spiral over and backward from the truck and bounced as the vehicle continued. I don’t remember what I did. My instinct would be to try to let the driver know, but that would involve a closer encounter with a curved dangling lance.
I think I must have remained behind at a safe distance till the driver stopped on his own.
As a Bostonian I am very familiar with disorder on early Storrow.
Disorder and Early Sorrow.
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It was translated in 2023 by Damion Searls as “Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow”.[5]
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Harrumph. “Chaotic world” is what the story is about, but “disorder” is more refined. However, I approve of “childhood sorrow” instead of “early sorrow”. “Early” suggests getting up with the cows. Or, as expressed in one of Bonfiglioli’s novels, “at sparrow-fart”.
Maine, The Way Life Should Be.
@languagehat: Unless that’s a different bridge from the one I’m thinking of, I don’t think there’s any right way to get a truck that tall under it.
As a Cambridge guy, the I always thought the funniest of those crashes of too-short box trucks were the ones in the short tunnel where Mem Drive goes under Mass Ave.
OK, I guess I was mixing up accounts of two different collisions from the MeFi thread. Apologies!
There’s the classic site 11foot8.com about trucks frequently crashing into an overpass in Durham, NC. It has videos of 182 collisions since 2008. Well worth a visit.
“ An initial investigation determined the driver did not position the vehicle far enough into the left lane to pass under the lower side of the train trestle, officials said.”
Source: The original post by Mr. Hat “1. Via MetaFilter, where you can see a photo of a massive wind turbine blade knocked off a truck on Route 1 in Maine.”
The first link there is. “2.
Massive wind turbine blade hits bridge, ( https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/08/09/metro/tractor-trailer-carrying-windmill-blade-overturns-after-hitting-railroad-bridge-maine/ ) gets knocked off truck on Route 1 in Maine. “
Reader comments tell us a little more about the spread of storrowed, the churlishness of some Boston Globe readers, and…
It’s a very useful word in Boston (and immediately intelligible with no explanation to anyone who has lived in Boston for a reasonable length of time), but not sure why or how it should spread outside Boston. Are highways with ridiculously low clearances a problem to the same extent in any other major American city? Maybe in South Nyack you can get “South Broadwayed”. Getting Storrowed wouldn’t make much sense in any context in Vienna.
https://die-nachrichten.at/oesterreich/wien/wien-ottakring/lkw-unfall-in-wien-brueckenbeschaedigung-sorgt-fuer-zugverspaetungen/
“Solche Unfälle sind in diesem Bereich der Verkehrsroute nicht unüblich. .”
Getting Storrowed wouldn’t make much sense in any context in Vienna.
Etymology is not destiny. If a word catches on, its original context is irrelevant. And this is a good word.
Etymology is not destiny. If a word catches on, its original context is irrelevant.
As Maine goes, so goes the
nationworld.“troublesome areas like Storrow Drive” — aha, it took me two reads to spot the etymon. If the verb were “to Storrow” it would give a hint, but I guess the problem is so entrenched that Bostonians have moved past capitals.
Well, if it’s going to become a regular word it has to shed its capital.
My almost-10-year-old was fascinated by this sort of phenomenon when he was perhaps four years old, by which time there was already a LOT of youtube content documenting such incidents, but it is true we didn’t have a convenient single verb-or-noun to describe the phenomenon. So there’s definitely a lexical gap to be filled although whether or not this regional candidate will do it on a nationwide or Anglospherewide basis remains to be seen.
To answer Vanya’s query, this happens lots of places in the U.S. (and abroad as well), at least where the infrastructure is old — a typical source of these low-overpass problems is railroad lines that were built to go over the road to avoid a grade crossing but which are now extremely expensive to redo putting the tracks a few feet higher (and lowering the road may not be a good alternative if you’re now creating a location that will flood every time there’s a little bit of rain). Despite a dramatic increase in warning signage over the last decade or so, we still get a couple storrowings per year on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutchinson_River_Parkway near my house,* which has low clearances because it was built on a no-trucks basis a century ago and retains that policy. But there are still truck drivers who ignore the signs and slavishly follow some sort of driving-directions software on their phones that is not appropriately tweaked to eschew no-trucks-allowed or low-clearance routes.
*Note that per wikipedia the suburban part was built first, before noted archvillain Robert Moses got his grubby hands on the project and extended it south into the Bronx.
Does the Parkway have a “Last Exit to Brooklyn” sign ? I’ve always wondered where such an exit might be.
[…] the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutchinson_River_Parkway near my house,* which has low clearances because it was built on a no-trucks basis a century ago and retains that policy.
Many years ago, I heard a story on Public Radio about the low bridges across the Merritt Parkway, which, if my geriatric memory doesn’t fail me, is the Connecticut continuation of the Hutch. It was only a few miles west of my home, and I used it to commute up to Shelton, against the morning traffic headed to Stamford and NYC. That radio story declared that the low bridge height was designed to prevent busloads of poor New York City folk from invading Connecticut beaches. True or apocryphal, it seems a fair reflection of attitudes in the first half of the last century.
@ Stu Clayton
Does the Parkway have a “Last Exit to Brooklyn” sign ? I’ve always wondered where such an exit might be.
Fuzzy childhood memories suggest it was a sign on Northern Blvd. in Queens, before the Long Island Expressway (a.k.a., The world’s longest parking lot) was built. It might well have been on the LIE.
Internet search raises the possibility that the sign was in the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, now renamed for Hugh Carey. I-478
@cuchuflete: The low bridges on the Hutch would have prevented the buses from getting anywhere near the Ct. border where the Hutch transitions seamlessly into the Merritt. And the Merritt runs farther inland than Boston Post Road a/k/a U.S. 1, which I assume did carry intercity bus traffic back before I-95 was built. And carless New Yorkers in those days whether rich or poor could have easily gotten close to pretty much any Connecticut beach by taking the train. I suspect that what you heard was a distorted variant of a longstanding claim that the aforementioned archvillain Robert Moses deliberately put low bridges across the Southern State Parkway to keep busloads of poor NYC folk from getting out to Jones Beach on the south shore of Long Island. That claim is, to be fair, based on something that a real one-time aide to Moses really told Robert Caro when he was doing interviews for _The Power Broker_, but I have some skepticism about how reliable a narrator the aide was on that particular issue 40+ years after the fact.
ninja’d by JWB! (through some esoteric delay of post visibility, if the timestamp’s to be trusted)
low bridge height was designed to prevent busloads of poor New York City folk from invading Connecticut beaches.
i don’t know whether that’s true of the merritt, but it certainly is of robert moses’ efforts. if i’m remembering my caro properly, jones beach is the best-documented example, with low overpasses over the southern state parkway to prevent the extension of bus service to the “public” park he created serving as a key part of his social engineering of the beachgoing population (along with an exclusion of most forms of popular entertainment, which he saw as bringing the wrong people to places like coney island). if i remember right, there were some recent attempts to stir up a similar class- and race-based panic about the extension of public transit westward across los angeles that made it much easier to get from south l.a. to the venice and santa monica beaches.
@ Stu Clayton, August 11, 2024 at 7:20 pm:
Translator Damion Searls here; you are right, “Disorder” is more refined, that’s the problem! It is too wan and genteel. “Disorder” sounds like a vase is an inch out of place, or a shelf needs dusting, while order is a big deal in German and its absence, Unordnung, is correspondingly huge: the time is out of joint, everything topsy-turvy, society plunged into madness. In Mann’s title, referring to the German hyperinflation and social turmoil of the mid-1920s, it is arch but not minimizing.
“Sorrow”, too, is wan in “Disorder and Early Sorrow” but not in “Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow” because while German nouns are vigorous, in English the energy is in the verbs and adjectives. Being less coy and more concrete about the earliness in the adjective makes the sorrow less vague and weak: childhood sorrow is sadder than early sorrow, not logically but in English. That’s also why it’s “Chaotic World”: just chaos is weaker (like, chaos, dude); it’s more chaotic in English when it’s an adjective.
Sorry to somewhat hijack (carjack? storrowjack?) this thread, Hat, but I thought some of your readers might find this interesting enough. It also gives me a chance to say thanks for decades of fascinating reading!
Are you kidding? I love hearing from translators, and threads are made to be hijacked!
Fans of The Lord of the Rings might be interested in these lines from the recently published “Lay of Eitínuíliel the Trucker”. (He is that hero known East of the Sea as Articiel.)
Though reft of sleep, he forth did drive
In nighttime seeming morrowless,
And journeyed on, alert, alive,
Through Boston speeding storrowless.
Back in the ’70’s, the Ramones suggested that even if you didn’t have a car you could probably hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach with someone who did and that would be preferable to public transit (“Bus ride is too slow / They blast out the disco on the radio”). I was a little puzzled by that even as a teenager who didn’t live in NYC because I somehow knew you could in fact get to Rockaway Beach on the A train. But that was a Manhattan-centric view, because in those days pretty much* the only subway route to Rockaway Beach (in Queens) from Forest Hills (also in Queens) where the Ramones had grown up involved first going into Manhattan from Forest Hills and changing trains there for a very circuitous and time-consuming trip.
*OK quibblers, you could of course use what’s now the G train from Court Square to Hoyt-Schermerhorn to avoid Manhattan, but that would turn a one-transfer trip into a two-transfer trip and quite possibly add to your total time in transit because inter alia there’s no express option on the G line.
UPDATE: the “almost-10-year-old” referenced in my 1146 am post was sound asleep when I posted because he is visiting his grandparents in Taiwan where the time zone is very shifted from what it is here, but I then sent a link to the underlying story to the other side of the planet and I am now advised that he was shown the story upon awaking and enjoyed it greatly. So maybe he has not completely outgrown his youthful interest in the topic.
I feel certainsure that I have used, or at least heard, today’s word at some point, referring to the process by which one gains or loses small objects, especially books, that falls in between stealing and borrowing. “What happened to that first edition of On the Road you had in the college dorm?” “someone storrowed it 20 years ago, and his widow won’t return it.”
Yeah, or store + borrow – not outright steal but keep things for a little longer just in case. “Whose umbrella is that?” “It’s John’s. I’m just storrowing it till I get my own.”
Boston City Councilor James Jackson Storrow would doubtless be unhappy to learn that his name has become a word referring to the inefficient functioning of a municipal development and to the daily frustrations of the citizens of the Boston area—all the more so since he was opposed to the construction of anything like Storrow Drive in the first place.
I wonder, what is the origin of the surname Storrow?
James’s grandfather was Charles Storer Storrow. If the two names are variants of each other, I wonder how that happened.
Yes, Storrow is apparently a variant of Storer.
I’d never encountered ‘storrowing’ until I read this post and incorrectly guessed that it was a blend of ‘steal’ and ‘borrow’ – i.e. the act of borrowing something that is never returned.