Neige a neigé! Snow has fallen, snow on snow… We are inneviated. Toronto has not seen so much snow at one time in several years, and the usual approach around here to handling snow is not so functional: push it aside into piles to leave a space down the middle or, if no one really “owns” the section of sidewalk, just let people posthole in it until they stomp it into submission (and what about the streets? oh, of course they plough those… and push the snow from them right up onto the sidewalk, which leaves less space for those walking). And, finally, dump endless tons of icemelt crystals on it, so that until the weather warms up enough to drain it all away, we are left schlepping through a salty muck of slush.
This poses problems for nevigation, plainly.
Nevigation? I hope you’ll permit me a confection here. In fact, like inneviated, I’ve borrowed nevigation from Latin via Italian. But unlike inneviated, I intend it as a sort of play on an English word (also taken from Latin), navigation. In Italian, nevigare is just a variant on nevicare, which means ‘to snow’, from Vulgar Latin nivicare, from nivem ‘snow’. (Believe it or not, French neige also comes from that.) But I think getting around in the snow deserves its own special verb.
Especially in Toronto when it’s snowed heavily. I’ll tell you what, I grew up in Alberta, where it snows like this every winter and goes long stretches without getting above freezing (although at length, at least in southern Alberta, a chinook will blow in and warm everything up and make the snow disappear quite quickly). They don’t dump salt all over everything there. They dump sand and gravel on it, so that you can have traction on the hard-packed snow, rather than seeing it all become filthy slush that ruins shoes and soaks boots. (On the other hand, in Boston, where I’ve also lived, they just ignore it for a day and usually the rain washes it away the next day. And if it doesn’t, they all have heart attacks trying to shovel the stuff, because it’s so heavy wet.) In Alberta, you just put on your boots and rely on decent traction. Even on pathways where no one sands, you can make your way on the pack.
But in Toronto? Ah, no. When it actually really snows, every sidewalk becomes a valley between parallel impassible ridges, and if no one is shoveling the sidewalk, you will have many one-person passages and the occasional dead end. It sneaks around like the etymological derivation of nevigation.
I mean that literally, more or less. You see, nivem comes (with some drifting and clearance) from Proto-Italic *sniks. That in turn comes from Proto-Indo-European *snéygʷʰs, which is also – and, frankly, with less alteration – the origin of snow. Which makes a person want to just plough a clear path. Specifically, why not just say snowvigation?
Sesquiotica 