A most peculiar locution

Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
                               -- Circa 1840, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When poets use it, it can be an effective device: "The smith, a mighty man is he ..."

In the hands of ordinary mortals, however, this grammatical construction sounds archaic and ... odd.

But nowadays I hear it popping up, often several times in the same story, from a couple of reporters on TV newscasts here in Richmond.

"Of course those budget talks, they cannot be ignored." (Jerrita Patterson, WTVR, May 24, 2012)

"The family, they are still out of their home this morning." (Deon Guillory, WWBT TV, June 6, 2012)

"The details, they are still coming in." (Jerrita Patterson, WTVR, May 31, 2012)

"Rescue crews, they're still looking for anyone who may be trapped inside." (Greg McQuade, June 24, 2012)

And those are just the examples I happened to hear while I had a pen and paper handy.

I've taken to calling it the puerile appositive. And the puerile appositive, it is everywhere. (Forgive me.)

The juxtaposition of a noun and a pronoun that mean the same thing, as in "The Richmond School Board, they want to hear your thoughts" (Jerrita Patterson, May 29, 2012) is a waste of words, childlike and foolish. What's the point? Just say what you mean: The Richmond School Board wants to hear your thoughts." What's the point of the pseudo-explanatory "they?"

(We'll leave for a later discussion the fact that the school board is an "it," not a "they." Let's just tackle one problem at a time.)

A friend who knows well how to use words suggests that what I call the puerile appositive is most often used by speakers of English as a second language or by very young children who are still working out how to construct full sentences. Another grammarian told me it is almost, but not quite, a "clitic left dislocation." (I'm not certain what that means in everyday words, so I simply nodded sagely.)

But whatever it is, it's annoying.

Unless you're Longfellow, circa 1840.

And there is no local TV reporter who is even remotely able to use the language as deftly as Longfellow did.

"Impossible!"

Even today it's easy to imagine a Yankee soldier staring up at roughly the same view you see above -- minus the highway and utility lines.

That Yankee would have been a part of McClellan's Union army moving up on Richmond from the east. The major obstacles in front of him were the Chickahominy River (which is not very wide) and the Chickahominy Swamp (a serious obstacle). In the distance was the rugged Chickahominy Bluff, defended by Lee's Confederate army.

"Impossible!" that Union soldier might have said to himself. And he would have been right. The defenses given to Richmond by nature's terrain enabled Lee to drive McClellan more than 20 miles back toward the coast.

The Civil War battles along Richmond's outermost defenses happened in 1862, 150 years ago this month.

It's almost impossible to live in Richmond today without learning more about the Civil War. We're in the midst of the war's five-year sesquicentennial, and we're living in what was the Capital of the Confederacy.

Katherine Calos is doing much of the educating. She's the lead reporter for the local daily's coverage of the 150th anniversary, and she's doing a bang-up job, especially in selecting the daily newspaper clippings from the Richmond paper of 150 years ago that now run in the Times-Dispatch every day. And it seems that each time you pick up the paper she's got another feature story about some aspect of the war.

Most recently, the focus has been on June of 1862 when McClellan made his run on Richmond. The city, which had been on edge for weeks, expected to be invaded any day. The noise of cannon could be heard from downtown Richmond like distant thunder. Lee sent boyish General J.E.B. Stuart and his cavalry on what became Stuart's vitally important ride around the far side of McClellan's army to assess its exact position and strength. Stuart left on June 12 and returned on the 15th. His 100-mile route took him north from Richmond to Hanover Courthouse, southeast past Old Church, south to Charles City Courthouse, then northwest through New Market to Richmond.

I was on my way out to pick up a salad from the grocery store this afternoon when I realized I'd be driving straight toward what was Richmond's outer defense exactly 150 years ago. A short detour took me to the Chickahominy Bluff National Battlefield. It sits at the top of the hill you see above and it was from there and elsewhere that Lee's troops defended the city.

It's a small park today -- just a circular drive and a few information panels. On the other hand, the terrain doesn't seem to have changed much in 150 years. Like that Yankee soldier, I can't imagine how difficult it would have been to struggle through that swamp and up that bluff while under withering fire from above.

After a short stop at the park, and since it was a beautiful late-spring day, I drove a few miles further east towards Totopotomoy Creek in Hanover County. Turning left towards Studley, I felt like I had driven 150 years back in time into a green, vibrant, rural landscape, parts of which haven't changed much in the intervening years.

I found the creek, which stretches maybe 20 feet from bank to bank, and remembered the story of the death of one of Stuart's cavalrymen, William Latane -- the only one of Stuart's men to die during the mission. He was killed by Union soldiers in a skirmish at the creek. The story was immortalized for the South in an 1864 painting by William Washington that depicted Latane being buried at a nearby plantation by women, children and slaves. I have a reproduction of the original steel engraving of the painting on my dining room wall.

After  my sojourn through eastern Hanover, I headed back toward Richmond and my original destination.

As I said, you can't escape the Civil War in Richmond. In the grocery store parking lot sits a quarter-acre site surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. Inside the fence is a preserved breastwork from the inner defenses of the city 150 years ago.

In Richmond, reminders of the war are everywhere.

Say it again, say it again. Louder, louder.

Pithy.

Straightforward.

Provocative.

All things considered, it's a great billboard with an important message.

I am usually embarrassed by Virginia's socially conservative stance against all rights for gay people.

Then, too infrequently perhaps, along comes an organization like MothersAndOthersVA.org, and the future looks brighter.

The billboard was put up a couple of weeks ago in a prominent position in Richmond's near West End and is scheduled to be there for another few weeks.

I wish there were more such messages on many more billboards.