Cyndy and I drove to Weatherford to pick up a friend and take her to New Hope Equine Assisted Therapy in Argyle on Thursday. We have been to the Fort Worth area and beyond countless times over the years, sometimes in the rain. But Thursday there was more rain than we had previously seen in our forays in that direction. There were signs we hadn’t seen before with a term we hadn’t seen before.
“Excessive water on roadway.” Yep, we’ve seen that one – not on Thursday.
“Standing water on roadway.” Yep that one too – not on Thursday.
But “Possible ponding on roadway” we hadn’t heard. Are you freaking kidding me? (I didn’t get a picture of the sign due to darkness and the aforementioned rain and I was driving half the time). So the wording is paraphrased. But it turns out that ponding is actually the present participle of pond. Which doesn’t mean it’s not still stupid. In this viral day and age, there are many useless words that don’t really say a damn thing other than what the social media community has proclaimed it to mean. With no foundation whatsoever. It just sounds cool – or whatever term they’re using for that these days.
Which leads me to wonder – why does the present participle sound very much like a verb (just saying, don’t call me out on the technicalities).
So if you hit a pond on the road, do you hydropond instead of hydroplaning? How much water constitutes a pond? Following that thought, how would you recognize a pond as opposed to what we’ve always called standing water? The last time I saw enough water on the road to constitute what I would consider a pond, we called it flooding.
And the final question to the powers that be in the Fort Worth area: why did you wait to use the term until now? A lot of people won’t have a clue what that means. Or the capacity to figure it out going 75 miles an hour down the highway.
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Keep writing the songs that are in your heart.
Peace be with you.