I Should Start My Own Driving School

My friends, when you pick up your drivers' license study guide, there are a lot of terms that just. aren't. in there. For instance, I learned from Toni that when you're parking in a lot, and there is no car in the space in front of you, so out drive straight through to the far space, and can drive forward to leave the parking lot afterwards, that's called an Innie-Outie (minds out of the gutter, please). Also, if you, say, got your driver's license in a small town, where there were no two cars to parallel park between, leaving you miles of room to perform the manoeuvre (ha! had to look the spelling of that word up. I suck), and no clue on how to do it properly, you seek out double-long spots, which you can then pull straight into, then back up and drive forward until you're close to and parallel with the curb--this is called a Squeak-in. And, when you go through an intersection and have to drive in a loose N-shape to meet the road on the other side, which may or may not be the same road you started on, this is called the Halifax Squiggle. Because there are lots of them in Halifax. Well, guess what. Last night, we found a new one.

The background: yesterday, I was marking papers, and students kept doing that thing where the first, dependent clause doesn't gramatically refer to anything in the rest of the sentence, and I couldn't remember what it was called. I hunted down Trent's old Scribbling for Idiots (Engineering English, folks) handbook, but couldn't find it in there. It's very hard to look up a term whose name you don't know. This applies to people, too. Anyway, I called my friend Meg, who is a grammarphile and asked her. She flipped through her handbooks until she found it: it's a dangling modifier. Happy with the results of my phone call, my day went much better after that (yes, good catch, that is an example of one). By the way, did you know there's such a thing as a squinting modifier? Neither did I.

So. Back to the meat of my story: last night, Meg and I had a date to see a play together. It was in a cathedral on Tower Road downtown. Tower Road stretches from the hospital at South Street to Point Pleasant Park at the southern end of the peninsula. It's a short road, and I used to walk it several times a week to get to the park. That's weird, I thought. I've never noticed a cathedral on Tower Road. So I picked up Meg and we headed to Tower Road in plenty of time. Weird, Meg said when I gave her the address. That's on my running route, and I don't remember a cathedral there...
We parked near the hospital end of the street, and walked down to the other end, and then back up again. No cathedral. I called Trent at home and got him to double-check the address. 1300-something Tower Road. We walked back up to the top of the road, where Hana (my truck, people. Keep up!) was parked. The numbers end just under 1200. We checked the map to see if there was a Tower Road in Bedford or Sackville or something. Nope. We stare at the little streets on the Halifax map. And there, blocks to the North and West of the end of Tower Road as we know it, is a tiny little line also labelled "Tower Road." Gah! We get in the truck, drive like mad to Robie, park, and rush to the Cathedral, arriving about five minutes late!

So. This experience has led Meg and me to coin a new driving phrase.

Dangling Street: A street, road, or avenue which ends, then continues briefly and unexpectedly elsewhere, with no apparent connection to its other section or sections.