Having fun?
We aren’t likely to look at snowplows humorously and the people who have spent hours in bitter cold and snow driving them recently probably don’t find much about their work that is funny.
But in Scotland—-snowplows are funny. They call them “Trunk Road Gritters” there, perhaps because—as with our snowplows the trucks have blades on the front and grit-spreaders on the back.
Scotland is a nation almost as large as South Carolina. It is less than half the size of Missouri but has almost as many people (5.454 million there, about 6.1 million here).
The gritters in Scotland have names. Punny names.
Salt Disney
Blizzard of Oz
Lord Coldemort
You’re a Blizzard, Harry
Mary Queen of Salt
Tam O’Salter
Ice Destroyer
Salty
Rumble
Sprinkle
William Wall-Ice (William Wallace was a Scottish patriot. Mel Gibson played him in a movie)
Gonna Snow Dae That
Oor Chilly
Sled Zeppelin
Traffic Scotland has an interactive map that tracks each of them and records where they’ve been for the last couple of hours. You can check their locations on the Traffic Scotland map: https://scotgov.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=2de764a9303848ffb9a4cac0bd0b1aab
Perhaps the Missouri Department of Transportation can add a little glamour to our hardworking snowplow crews by giving Missouri names to its snowplows. One is a Kansas City journalist who covered China for decades. His name really was E. C. Snow.
Maybe Thomas Hart Bensalt
Snow Faurot
John J. Persnow
Harry Ice Truman
Slusch Lite
Sam Salton (for the Columbia native who founded WalMart)
Slush Limbaugh
Charles Cinderbergh
(stealing from the Scots): Salt Disney
Or more generically:
Where Have All the Plowers Gone?
Windchill Wills (for the old movie star)
Snowchilly Distanced
The Boone Slick
Cold County
Chillycothe
Monsandco
Political Slush Fun
Skid More
Slide-dalia
Snow Daze
Okay, this is getting sillier and siller. But that doesn’t mean you can’t join the merriment by adding better suggested snowplow names in our “comments” below. Who knows? Maybe MODOT will try to lighten the mood in the next big snowstorm by send out plows with names.
Nancy and I are hoping to go to Scotland later this year, Covid willing. We hope we don’t need to witness Sled Zeppelin at work but we’ll be on some of the roads where these gritters operate. Nancy is a property owner in Scotland and thus is entitled to the title of “Lady.” A few years ago I gave her a Christmas present of one square foot of land in a nature refuge. She has the title to the land and everything. I doubt that we’ll visit her property and we probably won’t spend any money making improvements to it.
On those bitter, nasty winter days when your car is progressing at seven miles an hour behind a snowplow, the time might pass a little faster if you try to think up a good name for the plow.
No, it’s not what you call it. It’s what you would name it.
‘Snow big deal. You can do it.