It won’t be long now before the hurricane season has passed, and, with it, the volatility of coastal winds. Bring on the mono-directional storms—the unrelenting northerly gusts, the odd gale-force southeaster. For Edgar Comee, of Brunswick, Maine, this transition marks a heightened alert in his self-appointed role of storm-watch monitor. His ears prick, his eyes narrow, the better to flag inexcusable mentions of that most unfortunate contraction: “nor’easter.” When he comes across the word, while watching a “cruddy local ABC news anchor,” as he puts it, or in the pages of a national magazine (see Talk of the Town, March 14, 2005), he dispatches a ready-made blue postcard.

“Now hear this!” the card begins. “The use of nor’easter to describe a northeast storm is a pretentious and altogether lamentable affectation, the odious, even loathsome, practice of landlubbers who would be seen as salty as the sea itself.” It continues in this baroque manner for several more sentences, and concludes, “You will of course accept my view in this matter in good part and will never again use nor’easter, at least in public, and thus oblige.” The card is signed, “Your most humble petitioner, Edgar Comee, Chairman, Ad Hoc Committee for Stamping Out Nor’easter.”

The northeast storm of which Chairman Comee speaks often originates when cold air from Canada mixes with warm air from the Gulf of Mexico, causing heavy offshore winds that veer toward the coast from a northeasterly direction. Comee, who is eighty-eight, estimates that he has sent out between one and two hundred carping postcards since the early nineteen-nineties. His is a committee of one—even his wife, he says, “couldn’t care less: she comes from the mountains of North Carolina”—albeit with any number of unwitting honorary members, kindred spirits whose handiwork, in the form of letters to the editor and op-ed pieces, Comee has compiled in a clippings file. For instance, there was the seafood entrepreneur Ed Myers (now deceased), who, while writing for a publication called The Working Waterfront more than a decade ago, identified the frequent use of “nor’easter” as a “festering sore in today’s marine and weather journalism.” And G. W. Helfrich, whose letter of September 8, 1994, to the Portland Press Herald reminds us that “New Englanders exercise considerable invention in avoiding the letter ‘r,’ ” and thereby makes the compelling case that the contraction, if there is to be one, must properly be spelled “no’theaster.”

Comee is partial to the uncontracted form, but vouches for the authenticity of “no’theaster.” “I picked up the fact to drop the ‘r’ in conversation with some of the Portland pilots who guide ships into the harbor,” he said the other day, omitting an “r” or two of his own. Comee’s seafaring credentials, it should be said, are impeccable. He was a Navy ship captain in the Second World War, and covered waterfront issues as a journalist for the Press Herald in the fifties. After some years in Washington, during which he worked as a press officer for the State Department, he retired, bought a thirty-six-foot ketch in Chesapeake Bay, and moved on board, along with his wife and two dogs. They sailed the East Coast for eight months—and managed, as he recalls, to steer clear of any treacherous storms.

So where does “nor’easter” come from? Is it, as some of Comee’s like-minded pedants contend, a relatively recent and misguided invention of landlocked meteorologists who want to sound authoritative? (M. S. Hayden, another writer of letters to the Press Herald, once proposed that the term “was probably created by authors from Indiana who wrote about the sea.”) Well, maybe not quite so recent. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the contested spelling dates as far back as 1836, when it appeared in a translation of Aristophanes.

“By the way, unfortunately, there is a school of higher education in Maine called the University of New England—a rather presumptuous title, but there they are,” Comee said. “It’s an institution of fairly recent history—it’s come up within the last twenty-five years—and, lo and behold, its athletic teams are known as the Nor’easters. Oh, God, yes. My grandson attended the school and, knowing my interest in this subject, dragged me into their gymnasium, and there’s this banner, twenty feet long or more, that says, ‘Nor’easters.’ So I did send off one of my cards to the president of the university.” The team name remains.

As the good fight drags on, Comee has taken up other small causes. Not long ago, he sent another ready-made grievance down this way—purely for inspection. It resembled a business card, and on one side he had written, “Useful in doctor’s or dentist’s office.” On the other: “Use of first names by younger persons in dealing with the elderly is presumptuous, demeaning, disrespectful and condescending, as though the offender were speaking to a child in need of guidance, correction or possibly a pat on the head and/or bottom.” Don’t call him Edgar.