Tom Angleberger

The New River Valley-based reporter answers your questions Mondays in his column, What's on Your Mind?

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Q: With the high price of fuel why are there not any Valley Metro buses running in the major corridors of Roanoke, say for example from along Virginia 419 from where it intersects with Interstate 81 in Roanoke County to downtown Roanoke? On a recent trip to Australia they had the buses running on the main corridors every 15 minutes.

-- Jay Brenner

A: Well, I don't know how things work in Australia, but in America, money makes the buses go.

"We're maxed out on our funding," said Dave Morgan, general manager of Valley Metro.

They get lots of requests for extended service at Valley Metro, he said. The wish list includes late-night buses, Sunday buses, buses to Bedford and Lexington and more frequent buses. And there's been talk lately of a bus taking people to an Amtrak station. That's a lot of buses, but as long as we're wishing, let's add a Virginia 419 bus.

Now let's talk reality.

Giving someone a bus ride isn't cheap. In fact it costs more than the fare. You could raise the fares -- and Valley Metro has -- but if you make it too expensive then you start to defeat the whole purpose of providing affordable public transportation.

So that's where the taxpayer comes in. The taxpayer pays the difference between the fare and the actual cost. About 50 percent comes from the federal government, some comes from state and some comes from the local governments.

Except in the case of Roanoke County. Roanoke County doesn't contribute anything right now.

So I'm afraid your Virginia 419 plan has two strikes against it. Like any new route, it's a big expense. And, secondly, it would serve a county that's not on board with Valley Metro.

"That really hurts the chances of that becoming a reality," Morgan said.

Q: What about the word "text?" It has always been a noun but now with cellphones, people speak of "texting" someone or that they "texted" someone. Is this just a new use of the word as a verb?

-- Anne West, Botetourt

A: I'm sick of people abusing the English language! These kids today never learned grammar properly, so they go around using nouns as verbs and verbs as nouns. I tell you it's an outrage -- oh, wait a second, did you say "text?" Oops, that's a different story.

Apparently I can't blame "text" on today's youth. Instead it was those crazy olden days people, like Shakespeare.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first uses of "text" as a verb came in 1599. And one of those was Shakespeare who verbed it up in Act V, Scene I of "Much Ado About Nothing."

"Yea and text underneath, here dwells Benedicke the married man." That doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but neither does the Bard's work in general.

In fact, there were two distinct meanings for "text." One meant to write something noncursively, what we would call "printing" today. And the other meaning was when you cited a Bible verse or some other piece of writing.

Then in 1998 came the first known written use of "text" as a verb on an Internet forum. By 2000 the word had spread to England's Guardian newspaper, and by 2004 the Oxford English Dictionary had updated its entry to include the meaning we know and love today.

Note: It's almost time for our summer edition of Ask The Readers. If you've got a question that can only be answered by the combined brain power and local knowledge of the entire region, send it in now.

If you've got questions, send them in to woym@roanoke.com or leave them on my voice mail at 777-6476 (please be sure to speak clearly and spell your name). I'll need your name, location and phone number or e-mail address.

Look for Tom Angleberger's column on Mondays.