Queries to stump an old chump

Had I been able to come up with the answers to a couple of queries thrown at me earlier this week by Mainers on a mission I wouldn’t now be passing the buck to readers who may have a better feel for the matters at hand. But I wasn’t, and so I am.

The first inquiry came from Bill Butler of Aurora, who rang me up to ask if I might know the meaning of the word “cormorant” as occasionally applied to some citizens whose names were listed in police-beat columns in newspapers of old. He said he recalled seeing the term many years ago in the old Bangor Evening Commercial, a respected cross-town rival newspaper that went out of business a half-century ago, but his research on the subject so far has shed no light on the subject.

Butler’s recollection was that the word was spelled the same as the world-class ugly waterfowl so familiar to Mainers, and tended to be generally applied to a person for whom no home address was given on the police blotter. It did not seem to him that his dic-tionary’s second definition of “cormorant” (a gluttonous, greedy or rapacious person) could have been what the police of yore had in mind when using the term in a semi-official capacity.

My exhaustive search through numerous reference books of Maine lingo, as well as time spent ramming around on the Internet, yielded nothing. BDN librarian Charlie Campo, though, may have been a bit more successful. He found an Internet reference – not otherwise corroborated – that suggested “cormorant” has sometimes been construed to mean “hooligan.”

“Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,” first published by Harper and Row in 1959, defines “hooligan” as “a violent young rough; of late 19th-century origin from the name of a family of such people. Hence the word ‘hooliganism.'” It further explains that the original Hooligans “were a spirited Irish family of that name whose proceedings enlivened the drab monotony of life in Southwark” (London) in the late 1890s.

Because history tells us how shamefully put upon the Irish have been at times in this country, it wouldn’t seem to be a major leap to guess that the “cormorant” reference in the police-beat newspaper columns of yore may have been a code word for hooligans, Irish or otherwise.

Or might it be a case of “close, but no cigar” with the cormorant reference? Might the word in question have been nearly “cormorant,” but not quite? Inquiring minds want to know, which is why I’m extending the invitation to any old newspaperman or cop – or old cormorant or hooligan, for that matter – to step forward with an answer that will ease Bill Butler’s mind.

Query No. 2, provoked by last week’s column concerning young Americans’ shaky knowledge of geography, came from that erstwhile tilter at windmills, Mike Gleason of Bangor. It concerned the estimated length of the Maine coast, when all of the inlets, outlets, bays, coves, headlands, islands and assorted accidents of Mother Nature are included.

Gleason e-mailed me to explain that he long ago was taught – as were we all – that the Maine coast, though roughly just 230 miles as the crow flies, is approximately 3,500 miles long when the aforementioned geographical features are considered.

But in commercials and promotions produced by the Maine Office of Tourism to lure tourists to the state, a narrator states that Maine has “over 5,000 miles of coast,” Gleason said.

“Wait a minute. Was I misled as a youth?” he asks. “Did I fall asleep somewhere in that geography class discussed in your column? Worse yet: Did the Maine coast actually grow by over 42.8 percent in the past few decades, and I missed the phenomenon?”

To complicate matters, according to Gleason, if one visits the Maine Tourism Web site “the coast becomes even longer. I quote: ‘White sand ocean beaches cover much of the southern Maine coast and dot the rest of the 5,500 miles of Maine coastline.'”

“I’ve researched. I’ve Googled. But I can’t come up with an accurate, authoritative figure for the actual cumulative mileage total for the Maine coast,” Gleason laments. “I can neither substantiate my 3,500 miles nor refute their 5,500 miles…”

Which is where I was supposed to come in as Gleason’s all-knowing “authority of final recourse” in his quixotic quest for Truth In Maine Advertising. But because both claims seem to me to be pure hokum for the masses, perhaps the work of a drunken cartographer with a good sense of the absurd, I stand aside in favor of readers ready to take on the job.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.