snowfort

plural snowforts

1. alternativeAlternative form of snow fort.

   The good memories he had were gone, / Like playing catch with Dad on the lawn. / He forgot about happiness, he didn’t remember / About the snowforts and toys in December.

   1998, Lauren Rhynes, “Life”, in Olivera Andric, editor, Voices in the Wind: An Anthology of Verse from Young Canadians Aged 13-18 Years, Victoria, B.C.: Poetry Institute of Canada at Pictorial Press, →ISBN, page 265, column 2

   2 more examples

   The snowball fight, ‘a pretty satire on war and military glory’, should, [Nathaniel] Hawthorne feels, end in the building of a monument of snow of which future observers will ask, ‘How came it here?’ For Hawthorne, it might jocularly be said, the snowforts of children are the American equivalent of European ruins.

   1989, Bernard Mergen, “Winter landscape in the early Republic: survival and sentimentality”, in Mick Gidley, Robert Lawson-Peebles, editors, Views of American Landscapes, Cambridge, Cambs.: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 175

   Alain Noël (1993) would probably find even this open-ended formula much too mechanical. In his excellent critique of various regulation theories he says that the historical record teaches us that: / regulation is more akin to the snowforts children build in winter. The participants erect a wall, add a motif – inspired by the neighbor’s snowfort – open a loophole, break a side-wall in an unexpected battle, in short, they continuously build and renovate, without ever stopping, until the whole project is finally destroyed by a war, a celebration, or a heavy rainfall. An ongoing project, the snowfort is never finished until it is lost or abandoned. What matters for the participants is less the outcome than the process, less the snowfort itself that the always fragile agreement of all around a common vision, which organizes the games for a period.

   1994, Craig N. Murphy, “Notes”, in International Organization and Industrial Change: Global Governance since 1850 (Europe and the International Order), New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 302