How big was this weekend’s really big mid-Atlantic snowstorm? So big that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson noted it in their diaries!

Really. The New York Times said so. Our founding fathers wrote in their diaries about this weekend’s storm. Awefomenefs.

This snowstorm was bigger than the U.S. Civil War, bigger than the moon landing, and bigger than Lady Gaga and Elton being on stage together last week! Geo. and Th. didn’t write about those other things, right? I mean, I spent most of the summer of ‘69 reading and would’ve seen something about the moon landing being in those guys’ diaries, I think. Yeah, Nixon was president, but still, we’d know, right?

Here’s the Times quote:

The National Weather Service said the blizzard did not challenge Washington’s 28-inch record, set in January 1922, a snowfall that collapsed the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater, killing 98 people and injuring 158. Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, long before record-keeping began, although it was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Unless I missed something in Bits about time machines, I’m pretty darn sure the Times is wrong. Maybe they meant to write something like

The National Weather Service said the blizzard did not challenge Washington’s 28-inch record, set in January 1922, a snowfall that collapsed the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater, killing 98 people and injuring 158. Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, long before record-keeping began, although it that was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

or

The National Weather Service said the blizzard did not challenge Washington’s 28-inch record, set in January 1922, a snowfall that collapsed the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater, killing 98 people and injuring 158. Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, which occurred long before record-keeping began and was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Or maybe they meant this for an audio-only story, where it would be possible to say “Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, long before record-keeping began, although IT was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson,” (still sloppy, but talk is a whole nother language from written) because if you say “it” very emphatically, you can intimidate it and make it change its antecedent.

And maybe I understood what they meant, too. But writers should write as precisely as possible; they shouldn’t write in the spirit of nearest-neighbor error-correcting codes and assume it’s fine to publish written nonsense assuming the reader will subconsciously refer to a Hamming distance ruler and an unabridged vector space of things that make sense and infer the right thing.

Any errors, whether regarding pronomial antecedents or otherwise, are my responsibility.