I wanted to write something (else) about the consistently annoying road construction going on right outside my apartment. The street wart disappeared the other day, leaving only a stain for remembrance. I refer to the whole project, in conjunction with other street construction around my end of Boston and neighboring Brookline as “the little dig”. The little dig is all around me, and nobody knows the purpose.

I was shocked and dismayed, however, to find that the terminology “the little dig” is already widely in use – to refer to other projects! One religious onlooker thinks that we should each allow a “little dig” into our souls, while urban planning commentator Jane Holtz Kay has dubbed the Silverline tunnel project “the little dig”.

Clearly the Silverline project is big enough to warrant a “dig” name, but it’s only little when compared to the Big Dig – it’s quite big compared to the digging going on around my neighborhood. Thus I propose a new naming system to best accommodate the relative sizes of digs while quite handily coinciding with the soft-drink sizes at fast food restaurants. The Big Dig should be renamed the “Super Size Dig”; the Silverline project should be called, “The Large Dig”, and the project in my neighborhood should be dubbed, “The Regular Dig”. This leaves room for backyard and “soul” digging, hereinafter referred to as “The Child-size Dig”. Starbucks frequenters should cease going to Starbucks, but may use alternative dig names, referring to the dig formerly known as “The Big Dig” as the “Grande Dig”.

Okay – this is where my joke runs out because I’m unsure of the other Starbucks sizes. I know there is one called “Tall” but I don’t know if that is medium or large…