The Grammarnator was struck recently by a sign at the Liquor & Wine Outlet asking people not to park in the Firelane.
Compound words abound, and most of us can come up with a few without thinking very hard. Bookcase was the first that came to my mind, and then backpack. Others with the same beginnings are bookend, bookmark, bookshelf, bookstore, and bookworm; backslide, backspin, backstage, and backstop. But book club and book value remain separated, as does the back room where junk might accumulate and the back talk you should avoid with mom. Also, while it’s great to have a cookout in your backyard, the land between your house and street might be frontage, but it most definitely is not the frontyard.
Schoolboy is old enough to show up in a marvelous simile in Romeo and Juliet: “Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books, / But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.” For the poetically challenged, this portrays lovers rushing to meet each other as eagerly as schoolboys put their books aside, and parting with the same reluctance of those lads setting out for school in the morning. While in a scholastic frame of mind, I note that while whiteboards have replaced blackboards in most educational edifices, school boards continue to oversee what goes on in them.
In other words, compound words form easily, but some stubborn pairs refuse to slide together. And that brings me back to firelane (I shall ignore the bizarre capitalization in the NHSLC sign). I suspect that texting and tweeting mean that increased brevity will mark our written communication, even if it means simply shortening your strokes by leaving out a single space, an emptiness. I can see the future: firelane leads to firetruck leads to dumptruck and on and on.
