Talk:Edward Whalley

Regicide-commemorating streets

I removed "and in some neighboring Connecticut towns as well.", in favor of identifying the two towns that one street continues into. If there are others, re-add with refs.
--Jerzy•t 06:24, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

• I summarized the edit referred to above with

→His legacy: rewrite re streets

A colleague then edited, and summarized

the original didn't need a rewrite, but the rewrite sure does.

(Just for the record:

The revision i found did need a rewrite, bcz the sentence was clumsy, and the natural parsing was

The three regicides are commemorated

by three intersecting streets

in New Haven ("Dixwell Avenue", "Whalley Avenue", and "Goffe Street"),

and

in some neighboring Connecticut towns as well.

IMO a reader either is skimming, or processes syntax oddly, if they don't stumble over that and reread it once or twice, wondering whether the other towns' regicide-named streets really also have such an intersection. Especially a reader who's never noticed more than one street of each name.)

It's certainly the case that i bollixed my rewrite: a missing word and two redundant words, creating three grammatical errors (Ouch!), and some colleague's steadfast copyedit ala Linus's law was needed.
At the bottom line, tho, the wording of some specific facts turns out to be a slippery matter, and what little i did to improve that pretty well got lost at my colleague's hands.
I would call the supposed intersection in question a compound intersection, which is not an intersection, in much the same sense that an artificial leg is not a leg: too little of what is expected of a leg or an intersection is true of these respective variants. To describe it individually as "an intersection" (as opposed to including it in, say, a list of intersections) -- or the three Regicide streets as "intersecting", as what i found did -- is misleading and probably just plain wrong.
(BTW, the compound intersection is probably best described as involving six rather than five streets, as Howe St. intersects Whalley between Whalley's intersections with what probably count as Tower and Dixwell. (But to reduce complexity, i'll intentionally ignore Howe in the rest of this discussion.)
Note that (relying on the map -- i've never wanted to follow many of these hypothetical routes) in this compound intersection, you can get onto Dixwell only from Broadway and probably Tower, and onto Goffe probably likewise (but maybe also from Dixwell). You can get onto Broadway from all the others, and onto Whalley probably from all its others. (Tower, being one-way inward, can't be entered at all via the compound intersection.)
More specifically:

1. Strictly speaking there is a single (ordinary) intersection between Tower and Broadway. But speaking that strictly is deceptive: Broadway is a divided street, with its NW-bound-side intersection with Tower lying about 150 feet (across four ranks of parking spots) from the nearest point on its SW-bound side. Lemme say that a little differently: if you picked up a length of Park Avenue in Manhattan, including the sidewalks, the landscaped divider between the two directions of traffic, the three lanes of traffic in each direction, and the parking lane in each direction, and dropped it on top of the parking lot dividing the two directions of traffic on Broadway, you'd probably have New Haven cars in the parking lot sticking out, and no obstruction to New Haven traffic. (The other side of Broadway has no intersection with Tower, but one common-sense analysis is that Whalley becomes one-way at Howe, and changes its name to Broadway; Tower ends at what is, in that view, its other intersection with that pretty damn straight Whalley/Broadway stretch of road -- about 250 feet west of the previously mentioned intersection -- so that "at the intersection of Broadway and Tower Parkway" can reasonably elicit "where in that 250-foot long intersection?"
2. Whalley and Goffe never intersect, and Whalley and Dixwell do so only via a one-way connector that may have no name or a different one from Dixwell. So we must not say that the three Regicide-named streets either collectively intersect, nor "meet each other". So the cases of actual intersection (as opposed to relative proximity of origins), are probably irrelevant in Whalley's article (perhaps in contrast to Dixwell's, on the argument that Dixwell intersects each of the other two).
3. The essentially parenthetical (tho parenthesis-free) placement of the list of three streets implies or at least suggests that the regicides, not the streets, meet at Broadway and Tower.
4. Less significantly, commemoration by things that lack intention (streets) is IMO a bit metaphorical, and unenc'ic enuf to be avoided unless avoidance is awkward; entities with intention commemorated the three, with or by means of the streets or the streetnames (or, literally, in the act of naming them).

Here's my newly revised 'graph; i don't know whether my colleague actually objects to "commemorated with" or if so why, so i've made that change without waiting for discussion:

Whalley was one of three New Haven regicides, each commemorated with a street named for him, specifically, Whalley Avenue, Dixwell Avenue, and Goffe Street. These streets diverge from a complex of intersections lying at the northwest end of Broadway (and Dixwell extends into Hamden and North Haven).

(We've both been preserving the other-towns info; i'm not sure, really, that that makes any sense except in the Dixwell bio.)
--Jerzy•t 02:31, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1877

this edit added some text to this article on 22 September 2005 it also adder this line Additions to this entry from Lucius Paige, "History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1877". So I am going to add that as the source for that information. I am not going to attempt to check it against the source but assume good faith. If someone else is not sure that it is accurate then please remove the citations and the source. -- PBS (talk) 17:46, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Cite Appletons

this edit introduced {{Cite Appletons|Whalley, Edward|year=1900}} into the external links section without adding new text so I am going to move it back into that section. -- PBS (talk) 17:53, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Unsourced speculation

It is not clear why the two men decided to settle in Cambridge. An Edward Goffe was a resident, but there is no evidence that William Goffe was related. It seems more likely that they came to Cambridge because of their close ties with Captain Daniel Gookin. Gookin was one of the town's most active citizens; among many other roles, he was a selectman and a long-time Governor's Assistant. He was much involved in military matters and had been elected Captain of the Cambridge military company. He was trusted by Oliver Cromwell and selected by him to assist in transplanting a colony from New England to Jamaica. He visited England twice; on his second voyage back to the colonies, Whalley and Goffe were fellow passengers and may have stayed with him during their time in Cambridge. Later, Gookin appears to have managed the local holdings of the two regicides.

I have moved the above text from the article to here because I can not source it, and as it is speculative it is a point of view and as such needs a reliable source to make such speculation otherwise it is SYN. -- PBS (talk) 14:24, 11 May 2013 (UTC)