NOR'EASTER.(The Talk of the Town)(storm naming)

It won't be long now before the hurricane season has passed, and, with it, the volatility of coastal winds. Bring on the mono-directional storms--the unrelenting northerly gusts, the odd gale-force southeaster. For Edgar Comee, of Brunswick, Maine, this transition marks a heightened alert in his self-appointed role of storm-watch monitor. His ears prick, his eyes narrow, the better to flag inexcusable mentions of that most unfortunate contraction: "nor'easter." When he comes across the word, while watching a "cruddy local ABC news anchor," as he puts it, or in the pages of a national magazine (see Talk of the Town, March 14, 2005), he dispatches a ready-made blue postcard.

"Now hear this!" the card begins. "The use of nor'easter to describe a northeast storm is a pretentious and altogether lamentable affectation, the odious, even loathsome, practice of landlubbers who would be seen as salty as the sea itself." It continues in this baroque manner for several more sentences, and concludes, "You will of course accept my view in this matter in good part and will never again use nor'easter, at least in public, and thus oblige." The card is signed, "Your most humble petitioner, Edgar Comee, Chairman, Ad Hoc Committee for Stamping Out Nor'easter."

The northeast storm of which Chairman Comee speaks often originates when cold air from Canada mixes with warm air from the Gulf of Mexico, causing heavy offshore winds that veer toward the coast from a northeasterly direction. Comee, who is eighty-eight, estimates that he has sent out between one and two hundred carping postcards since the early nineteen-nineties. His is a committee of one--even his wife, he says, "couldn't care less: she comes from the mountains of North Carolina"--albeit with any number of unwitting honorary members, kindred spirits whose handiwork, in the form of letters to the editor and op-ed pieces, Comee has compiled in a clippings file. For instance, there was the seafood entrepreneur Ed Myers (now deceased), who, while writing for a publication called The Working Waterfront more than a decade ago, identified the frequent use of "nor'easter" as a "festering sore in today's marine and weather journalism." And G. W. Helfrich, whose letter of September 8, 1994, to the Portland Press Herald reminds us that "New Englanders exercise considerable invention in avoiding the letter 'r,' " and thereby makes the compelling case that the contraction, if there is to be one, must properly be spelled "no'theaster."

Comee is partial to the uncontracted ...