This and that

So this is how you make room for more housing in a town where open land is almost nonexistent. And how to do it very close to a downtown that is experiencing a burst of new ideas, new offerings.

You may have been holding on to a piece of land that has lost tenants in an older building and has a very large vacant parking area. You wait until the right idea comes along, in this case a new way of building townhouses that are stacked up, called two-over-two.

That in the editor’s mind is how we are going to see the three acres just behind CVS Pharmacy reworked. It has a long history. Late in the 1800s it was a spring factory but by about 1905 it was empty so Allen Young used it to start the classrooms which became the Wake Forest Normal and Industrial School, teaching generations of Black youngsters and teens. Later the site may have held a cotton gin; it was somewhere in that vicinity.

When Roosevelt Avenue was built in the 1930s the land on the north side the new street sprouted first one and then two Esso gas stations next to the roomy Hollowell’s grocery store while the land behind them grew up in weeds and then trees with a couple buildings along North White, including the Jones Miracle Temple Holiness as written on its tin roof.

John Lyon bought Hollowell’s from his father-in-law and then redid the land behind it as Lyon’s grocery store with ample parking and extra commercial space next to the grocery. For a brief spell he even had two lions in a cage near the front door, but humanitarian notions caused their removal to a farm where they could roam.

And now that land is going to be turned to housing with the two-over-two idea. It sounds like a good use of three acres. I just hope that the new tenants can also learn and appreciate the history of the land.

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I have two current pet peeves about reporting. The first is the almost total use of “prior to” lately rather than “before” in printed and online reporting. Why?

Before can be a preposition or an adverb and its antonym is after. We all know what it means, and although I no longer have the two-volume Oxford English Dictionary I am pretty sure before is in the tradition of concise words dating back to Anglo-Saxon. English through and through.

Prior to sounds affected to my ears; a more “glamorous” way of saying before. I suspect it is part of the French influence on the English language, and it may be useful in some circumstances but I do not consider it to be a phrase you always use when you mean before.

My other peeve is plethora, even though its use has somewhat diminished in recent months. First of all, its meaning has been misunderstood. Plethora refers to an excess, over-abundance, surplus, glut and surfeit. It is now being used as meaning plenty or many. And when a writer types “a whole plethora of” something you know he/she is too lazy to pick up a dictionary.

My favorite dictionary is heavy to pick up but worth it, the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus “for the writer in everyone.” It gives you The Right Word on almost every page. For example, it tells you how a plot differs from a conspiracy or a cabal and how they are carried out through machinations and intrigue.

It gives you page-long degrees of comparison from plain to fancy, running through muted and simple to ordinary and workaday to decorated, snazzy, fussy, posh, luxurious and baroque. It is a book that makes you think about how you write.

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