It's hard not to be a bit suspicious when these fires happen.

Re: doing something about said fire hazard, I seem to recall that several years ago, some kid doing a science project came up with a way of recycling tires into roadbed, either as a surface or for substrate fill. (I would Google, but it's late and I can't keep my eyes open...) I wonder if the separation issue Dave Bell @1 mentions is why we're not doing more road-related stuff.

Googling around tells me that recycling tires is very difficult. Tires are designed to be nearly indestructible under very harsh conditions, and so indeed they are. You'll find things ranging from freezing-and-shattering them to pyrolysis to chemicals to microwaves ... with the occasional obvious scam (buy our report to learn how you can set up a profitable tire-recycling business today!) thrown in. But still no consensus on the best way to recycle, or what products to recycle them into, and a huge backlog of tires (junk tires apparently generate at the rate of one per person per year) to deal with.

The apartment I then moved into must have been empty at the time, because there was a nearly-invisible film of black dust/soot on the floors and other surfaces. I had to spend a couple of hours cleaning it up before I could move anything in.

[NoScript is warning of an exploit on the comment page. Let's see if this posts.]

Wish that they would do that here in New Orleans. The live oaks are beautiful, but they demolish sidewalk in no time. Imagine a rubber sidewalk that expands to accommodate tree roots. Yes--I know that I am crazy.

Fowler may easily have been correct about the etymology, and in his day I'm sure I would have been irritated to see the spelling change so apparently incorrectly. I would argue, however, that if the latest edition still prefers "tire," it's exceedingly stubborn and simply not a usable reference for current UK English. I've never seen any indication that "tire" would be considered an acceptable spelling in this country (nor, with less confidence, in places like India and Australia). It's become a treasured difference between British English and US English, which is why the word "variant" struck me funny.

guthrie @ 13 -- Part of the idea of burning toxic-when-burned organic materials in a cement kiln is that the toxic byproducts react with the cement components, and are held longer to complete the oxidation and become non-toxic and/or become part of the cement mix. PCBs have been very successfully destroyed in cement kilns, with at least part of the chloride remaining in the cement rather than escaping as hydrochloric acid gas (HCl). If tires were burned in a cement kiln, the sulfur from the tires would mostly stay behind as sulfate instead of becoming a sulfur oxide air-pollution problem.

I certainly wouldn't recommend Fowler as the first port of call for English-usage disputes, but he's still entertaining to read. Much of the entertainment value comes from the unexpected things he gets angry about. He often sees American spellings (skeptic, -or instead of -our) as superior to English ones.

Several times I've tried to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the section on Shall and Will in The King's English but I always come unstuck. ("It is unfortunate that the idiomatic use, while it comes by nature to southern Englishmen (who will find most of this section superfluous), is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly acquire it[...]")

Early in The King's English he takes a contemporary author to task for Americanizing the English language—the author is, of all people, Kipling.

I've internalized shall/will to the point where a few days ago I was chastising the next door neighbor's offspring who set off the bottle rocket right underneath my window, and said, "If this happens again I *shall* call the police!" without any forethought whatsoever.

Like joann@22, I've internalized shall/should somewhat; it makes this Canuck sound even more British. Then again, I've always been a linguistic Anglophile; blame PBS for Masterpiece Theatre and all those intelligent Brit crime shows.

In twenty-odd comments we've gone from burning tires in NJ to grammar and legalese... awesome.

Simpsons fans will probably be thinking of the Springfield Tire Fire, "Established 1989."

I don't know what to say about "shall" and "will." When I was younger, I thought "shall" was well on its way out. It's perfectly current among some people I know, though.

What far streets or skyscrapers,
Obscure the vision of your fires?
What technologies, what wires,
Guide the hand that dares the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,
Could still the cinders of thy heart?
And when thy passions start to flare,
What dread hand? and what scorched hair?

What the ladder? What the hose?
In what furnace dares repose?
What the trucks? In what dread grasp
Cause it’s mortal foes to gasp?

When the stars abandoned poses
Watering sensibly with hoses,
Did he smile, his work to see?
Did he who made the fire go free?

Tyres, Tyres, burning bright,
In the junkyard of the night.
What skilled mortal hand, or eye
Dare quench such dread immolat’ry?

The chief downside is that the road surface has to be at least 85F for it to stick properly (it's someone helped by the pavement temperature usually being higher than the ambient temperature). This isn't a problem in Arizona, but can be in colder climates. It makes the construction season too short, or requires expensive artificial heating.

(hm... google tells me the piece is in Irons in the Fire, but I'm not immediately seeing anything that would help me look up what happened to the plant.)

Beat Generation Applause! ** snaps fingers **

I remember a tire fire in the SF Bay Area, probably 1976. A dump in Milpitas, which at the time was not yet heavily built up, with a huge pile of tires caught fire and burned for days. The Bay tends to trap air at the south end, so everywhere from San Jose to Oakland on the east side stank for more than a week.

"I shall return."

Was Douglas MacArthur a better military man than he was a grammarian?
:-)

On the other hand, I suppose providing a stranger with a giggle isn't a bad thing...

If they use "tyres" exclusively in India, one might suspect that more people use that spelling than the other, worldwide, yet over the past day I've come across a lot of examples on the web of North Americans hurling abuse at others who dare to use this spelling, as though it were not only unheard-of, but offensive!

Interestingly (?), although we like our British spellings, in Canada we write it "tire." It's even enshrined in the name of one of our most venerable retail chains: Canadian Tire.

It's funny that Twitter has taken roughly the place formerly occupyed by the town cryre.

I'm sure the smell is fairly dyre, but oddly enough, I didn't smell it here at all (in Hoboken, NJ); if you don't believe that, feel free to call me a lyre.

I have no desyre to get myred in a discussion of British vs. American spellings, but I blame Noah Webster for this one; certainly he's the syre of a lot of others. Guy should have been hung on a wyre. Perhaps we could all conspyre to change it back.

What?
___
*Seriously, KayTei, that was magnificent!

The 1919 edition of "Modern roads" (published in england) that I have uses terms such as rubber-tyred. It is most interesting reading about the old fashioned but often quite sophisticated methods of making roads, which then does make me wonder why modern road menders manage to get it so horribly wrong sometimes.

Of course the old Concise Oxford agrees with Fowler.

Take a look at the editors' names...

So global warming will help us recycle tires!

It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

Fragano, clearly he keeps the tyres in the byre, 'cause the coop is full of...

uh. Chickens. Yes.

It's actually not the first time there's been a big dump fire affecting New Jersey - in 1989, a fire under I-78 melted the freeway, and in ~1978 a tire dump fire over on the Pennsylvania side closed the Commodore Barry Bridge.

I've got a bad desyre
Ooooh, I'm on fyre

1) Was there a distinction between "shall" and "shalt"?

2) Was there ever a subject/object distinction for third-person neuter, that is "it"? That is, we have I/me, formerly thee/thou✌, he/him & she/her.

✌ : My understanding is that thee/thou picked up associations of intimacy (which is why they were retained longer in prayer), and were replaced by the former second-person plural, "you". Amusingly, Southern American dialect seems to have supplied a replacement second-person plural, "you all", sometimes contracted to "y'all".

And as for "y'all", other dialects of American English have other forms of the second person plural. Here in the Pittsburgh area, for example, the stereotypical native says "yinz", sometimes spelled "yuns" or (more formally, displaying it's original form) "youns" or "you ones". Yours truly has been known to "yinz" people and even to refer to myself as a "yinzer". Even my car wears a sticker that says "YNZ". "Youns" or other variants are known, I'm told, elsewhere, mostly downriver (the Ohio River, that is) in the midwest or upper Mid-South, but we Pittsburghers tend to think of this form as ours.

And I see I managed to muff my slash ordering (twice!): before someone calls me on it, "thou" is subject (I/he/she), "thee" is object (me/him/her). Assuming I'm not really too sleepy to be posting, that is....

Mary Aileen #58: And is there any particular reason why second-person-singular of "shall" gets a variation, or is it just English Is Weird?

nighty-night...

Here in Australia the second person plural can be "youse" or "you's" (which I choose to believe is a contraction of "you [plural noun describing persons]" rather than a greengrocer's apostrophe).

Clearly there is a hole in the language, and it wants to be plugged.

Kinky.

These exist in various cases, but yiz can probably work those out for yizzerselves.

The DOT I work for has a policy on using old tires in large embankments in an attempt to reduce the huge surplus of them. The rules are so stringent (have to be above all water levels, several feet of soil surrounding them, etc) that few projects actually end up using them. Some attempts have been made to grind them up and mix the fragments into asphalt for road surfaces, and retaining walls have been built with them, but those efforts barely make a dent in the numbers of old tires.

It's a holdover from when English verbs were more highly inflected, in large part because "thou" fell out of use so its verb form never got leveled (linguistics term alert!) like the more-used forms.

Consider, for example, the modern use of the verb "have". I have, you have, he has, we have, you have, they have. Back in the day, it would have been I have, thou hast, he hath...; "thou" went away and "hast" with it, and "hath" took a slightly different set of sound changes than "have", to become "has". If "thou" hadn't fallen out of use, I'll bet it might have turned into "has" as well.

(sung by the dump owner:)

From Brooklyn's shore to many more
The stinking plumes now fall.
And we don't give a damn for the fireman
Who is forced to fight it all.
What we couldn't sell you'll be forced to smell
And to clean it off your wall;
All the rats will roam and will find new homes
In your basement and your hall.

Burning tires in New Jersey, me boys
Burning tires in New Jersey
The smoke is dire from the smould'ring tires
Burning down in New Jersey.

Turkish - which is not Indo-European - has a similar convention. Confusingly, (at least for me) the situations in which it is appropriate to use the informal form differ subtly from those in French (or at least the French they speak in France: I know that in Quebec, and perhaps also in Stratford-atte-Bowe the conventions are different again.)

Given David Goldfarb's comment @ 64 I'm wondering whether how long this has been a feature of Turkish. (Is it a comparativelhy recent borrowing form the French? Was it a feature of Ottoman? Borrowed from the Greeks? Present in
Linked text)

There's something about New Jersey that seems to attract this sort of thing.

For me, this suggests adding a verse to The Rolling Mills of New Jersey:

From Jersey City the stench will flow,
And soon everyone in Brooklyn will know
Where all their discarded tires did go,
The burning tires of New Jersey.

Everyone else: For 'sausage' read 'hostage', and for 'Linked Text' read 'Azerbaijani' throughout.

We pray for one last landfill
For the Jersey tires that burn.
We enshrine our trash on the nearest shore;
For the cool, green hills we yearn.

Please don't use New Jersey as a byword for "possibly toxic stench."

But can we still hiss?

We default to 'Kiwi'; use of 'New Zealandian' will get you funny looks.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply anything about all of New Jersey. I was versifying on the particular event that occasioned this thread, not New Jersey in general.

In Central Washington, in the 1960s, if the fruit trees budded early and spring came late, and you wanted a fruit crop that fall, the accepted thing to do was heat your orchard by burning old tires (as well as other things such as oil and sawdust) in smudge pots.

Since the Valley was a natural bowl, the temperature inversion would keep all of the hot air filled with black oily soot at pretty much ground level. I remember my mother covering all the good furniture with old sheets on nights the frost report said it would be bad.

Something about that title has been nagging at me; this morning I realized that it scans to Rolling Down To Old Maui.
[...]
Burning tires in New Jersey, me boys
Burning tires in New Jersey
The smoke is dire from the smould'ring tires
Burning down in New Jersey.

Well, no, it doesn't scan, not really.

What you've written scans exactly like the filk parody "Falling Down on New Jersey," and with all due respect to the estimable Mitchell Burnside-Clapp, his song doesn't scan quite right, either.

Falling DOWN on NEW jer-ZEE, me boys...

In my experience, outside of this song, nobody calls the state NEW-jer-ZEE. I hear "new JER-zee." Mitch shoehorned the state into Stan Rogers's scansion, and so did you.

This flaw does not prevent people from happily singing his song, which is fine.

To be frank, Stan Rogers had his own shoehorn. If he wanted to write a song about Maui, he should have chosen a rhythm that was a better fit. As it is, he calls it "OLD mau-EE, me boys." There is no particular reason why Maui should be called "old" in this song. It's an extra syllable jammed in to fit the music.

Using "old" in this way is a crutch, common in mediocre songs. A peeve of mine.

Come to think of it, do people emphasize the final syllable when they talk about Maui?

Stan Rogers wrote some great lyrics, but this song's chorus is not his finest hour.

Sorry, but Stan Rogers didn't write the song. It's attested back to 1858 at least. He may or may not have altered the tune, but the lyric clearly puts an emphasis there in any case.

Since the sailors didn't mind putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle, I'm perfectly content to follow their lead.

Well, that's not the first time there's been egg on my face. Probably won't be the last...

(I'm still cranky about the scansion, though.)

Darned sailors. <nodding>

Here in Yorkshire it did. "Thou" (pronounced "tha"*) is still used by dialect speakers. The following verb form is identical to the 3rd personal form, usually abbreviated, e.g. "Tha's bin a-coortin' Mary Jane." A preceding verb may take the old form, e.g. "Wheer 'ast tha bin sin' Ah saw thee?"

*Actually right here, it's "da", which is why we Sheffielders are called "Dee-Dahs".