Hal goes horizontal in Viewing Room 5
The North American Collegiate Dictionary claimed that any ‘very heavy’ snowstorm with ‘high winds’ qualified as a blizzard. […] The condensed O.E.D., in a rare bit of florid imprecision, defined blizzard as ‘A furious blast of frost-wind and blinding snow in which man and beast frequently perish,’ claiming the word was either a neologism or a corruption of the French blesser, coined in English by a reporter for Iowa’s Northern Vindicator in B.S. 1864. […] If you want prescriptive specificity you go to a hard-ass: Sitney and Schneewind’s Dictionary of Environmental Sciences required 12 cm./hour of continuous snowfall, minimum winds of 60 kph., and visibility of less than 500 meters; and only if these conditions obtained for more than three hours was it a blizzard; less than three hours was ‘C-IV Squall.’ The dedication and sustained energy that go into true perspicacity and expertise were exhausting even to think about.
Context
Hal flat on the Viewing Room 5 floor after the panic attack, the blizzard howling outside, and the narration collapsing into an anhedonic shuffle of unranked facts — in which three dictionaries duel over what a blizzard even is, interleaved (in the untrimmed text) with the things he can't rank against them: Himself's delusion that Hal wasn't speaking, the Moms's blurry-faced pain. The prodigy dissociating into lexicography: definition-comparison sitting where feeling should be. "If you want prescriptive specificity you go to a hard-ass" is practically the Militant Grammarians' family motto, delivered by the son at his lowest — and an echo of n.64's Samuel Johnson, "the original grammato-lexical-and-pedagogical hard-ass" (see the supporting cast).