QUIBBLE’S QUAGMIRES: Or, How a Comma Nearly Doomed Us All

THE STEAMBOAT DISPATCH
Chateaugay Lake’s Premiere (and Only) Purveyor of News, Nonsense, and Nefarious Happenings
September 26, 2025

QUIBBLE’S QUAGMIRES
Or, How a Comma Nearly Doomed Us All

By Erasmus P. Quibble, Esq.
Special Correspondent for Pedantic Apocalypses

BANNER HOUSE, LOWER CHATEAUGAY LAKE, NY — Readers, prepare yourselves for a tale of grammatical terror, semantic sedition, and the unholy power of the Oxford comma. This week, our idyllic hamlet has been gripped by a crisis so profound, so existentially petty, that even the Leviathan’s subterranean aria now sounds like a lullaby by comparison. I speak, of course, of The Great Quibble War of 2025—a conflict born not in the chasms of Bradley Pond, but in the fevered margins of Mrs. Agatha Twill’s revised Chateaugay Lake Bylaws.

THE COMMA THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

It began innocuously enough. Last Tuesday, the town council convened to vote on Ordinance 24601-B: “A Resolution to Prohibit the Feeding of Ducks, Geese, Swans, and/or Other Waterfowl Deemed ‘Uncouth’ by the Committee on Avian Decorum.” A straightforward measure, you might think. But then Councilman Horace Fiddlebottom—a man whose eyebrows alone could parse Latin declensions—noticed a missing comma after “Swans.”

“Without this punctuation,” he thundered, slamming a leather-bound copy of Strunk & White onto the podium, “we risk legalizing the feeding of Swans and/or Other Waterfowl as a single, unholy species! Are we to let semantic sloth pave the way for ornithological anarchy?” .

Chaos ensued. The council splintered into factions: the Oxfordians (pro-comma), the Minimalists (anti-comma), and the Libertarians (pro-duck-rights). By midnight, the town hall resembled the third act of Julius Caesar, if Caesar had been stabbed with quill pens and his blood replaced with red ink.

THE LEXICAL LÉVIATHAN STIRS

Unbeknownst to our grammatically besieged leaders, the Leviathan has developed a taste for petty disputes. Local thereminist Clíodhna O’Faelan reports that her instrument now thrums with “the vibrations of split infinitives and dangling modifiers.” She claims the beast’s latest aria, “Prelude in Pedantry,” is composed entirely of syntactic errors mined from Ralph’s Tavern Yelp reviews .

Even Dick Shutts, our venerable innkeeper, confirms the horror. “The suckers in the lake ain’t just groupies anymore,” he grumbled, polishing a taxidermied trout. “They’re forming subordinate clauses around the docks. Saw one diagram a sentence with its tentacles. Nasty business” .

Meanwhile, UVM metaphysician Johnny Goodrich—fresh from a lecture condemning the Libertarian Party’s “misuse of gerunds”—has traced the Leviathan’s newfound power to a primordial force: the Quibble. “Every trivial argument,” he intoned, sipping a tincture of absinthe and White-Out, “feeds the beast. It’s like a Kickstarter for cosmic calamity” .

THE SEMANTIC SUMMONING

The crisis reached its zenith yesterday when Mrs. Twill, in a fit of pique, declared the bylaws “null, void, and grammatically irredeemable.” Her subsequent attempt to burn the document in Bradley Pond backfired spectacularly. Witnesses report the flames coalesced into the spectral visage of Samuel Johnson himself, who lectured the crowd for 45 minutes on Shakespeare’s “pernicious puns” before vanishing into a cloud of semicolons .

Now, the lake glows an eerie shade of editorial blue. Fish leap from the water reciting sonnets in iambic tetrameter. And worst of all, the Leviathan has begun projecting subtitles.

A MODEST PROPOSAL

To the citizens of Chateaugay Lake, I offer this advice: Embrace the chaos. Let your quibbles flow like a river of ink into the Leviathan’s maw. For as the Bard himself wrote, “Brevity is the soul of wit”—but verbosity? Verbosity is the soul of survival.

CHATEAUGAY LAKE STEAMBOAT GAZETTE CO.