Miss Malaproperty

Heavy rain.  That's what they're saying for this evening.  Plenty of rain.  That's what they're saying for the next week or so.  

We'll certainly be the Emerald Empire, as someone named it several years ago.  Somehow, that hasn't stuck for many, many years like the Inland Empire did.  You've been around this area if you remember that moniker.

We used to be the Inland Empire.  I think our empire comprised Spokane and a radius of about 100 miles. 

When I was working for the Spokesman-Review after just getting over my young adult fixation with the Spokane Daily Chronicle, someone started calling us the Inland Northwest.

I don't know how big its radius is.  I just knew to use the term whenever I wrote a story.  

That was back in those same days (late '80s) when I received a stern warning to leave that damn apostrophe out of Pend Oreille.  My editor, whom we all called "Newman," was pretty stern about all my journalistic oversights.

That sternness did me a world of good, even though I did not appreciate it at the time. 

My Spokesman-Review feature-writing era may have also been when a lot of apostrophes got dropped from place names, although I do think Bonners Ferry was ahead of the game.  

In my lifetime,  Clark's Fork has become Clark Fork.  It took me several years to get Clark Fork to drop off my tongue, but I eventually learned. 

I was commenting the other day at Sam Wormington's memorial reception that someone in recent years decided that the "Selle Valley" had suggested a lot more "ambiance" that good ol' Selle ever did.  

In fact, it has such a nice ring to it and realtors became so desperate to sell a little piece of that "ambiance" to outsiders hungry for North Idaho land that the Selle Valley seemed to keep growing.  

Back in the day, Selle seemed to be just all those farms in the proximity of Selle Road .  Of late, the Selle Valley has been threatening to extend clear to Naples on the north, Rapid Lightning on the east, the Selkirks on the west and HWY 200 on the south.  

Never mind Oden, Colburn and Elmira.  Selle Valley ate 'em up.  

And, while I'm on "North Idaho" land, I've been instructed of late that this is no longer North Idaho.  We're properly referred to as "Northern Idaho."  So there!

As a blogger who owns her own blog and who says what she damn well pleases because she owns her own blog, I'll still call it North Idaho, thank you.

Can you imagine my having to suddenly refer to the road where I grew up Northern Boyer?  Ain't gonna happen in my lifetime.

Or, how about that road that extends off from Center Valley Road to the north.  Should we be calling it Northern Center Valley Road and showing equity by referring to ours as Southern Center Valley Road?

Of course, there's a way to solve that problem.  They can just make some yellow road signs with arrows and refer to the whole Center Valley Road system as "Back Routes to the Dump."  

And, that would solve a lot of problems, I think.  But wait---to actually get to the dump aka Bonner County Transfer Station, you have to drive on Colburn-Culver Road.

And, wasn't that road or at least its SOUTH end running through Oden once dubbed as the Farm-to-Market Road?

My malapropertyisms could cause readers a lot of problems, so I guess I'll just shut up and get out there before it rains again to spruce up my place along the "Back Road to the Dump" so it looks nice for all the garbage transfer technicians driving by this Memorial Day weekend. 

Happy Wednesday.