Talk:Tempest Storm

Biography assessment rating comment
WikiProject Biography Assessment

The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article. -- Yamara 04:52, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:TempestStormbookcover.jpg
Image:TempestStormbookcover.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

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Poorly sourced
For a person with such a long career and noted accomplishments, can more sources be provided for the included material? Thank you, --72.209.9.165 (talk) 17:26, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Early Years
I've removed the comment about being an abuse victim / running away from home. It should not be replaced unless a reliable third party source for it can be provided. DMcMPO11AAUK/Talk/Contribs 18:22, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Older photograph would be appropriate
Anyone have an older photograph of this person? Seems to make sense to have a photo of her in her prime.Alialiac (talk) 14:05, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Pleonasm in the sub-section "Beginnings"
The first line of that sub-section runs:


 * In Los Angeles circa 1945 at age 17, Storm worked as a carhop waitress at Simon's Drive-In and then as a cocktail waitress, though still underage.

The phrase carhop waitress is pleonastic, because carhop just does mean "waitress who takes and delivers orders by moving from parked car to parked car in a drive-in restaurant."

I suspect the person who wrote the phrase did so because carhop is the name for an obsolete occupation, and thus acted on four presumptions: first, that obsolete realities are likely to be unfamiliar realities; second, that the mention of Simon's Drive-In would not suffice to indicate the unfamiliar word's meaning; third, that most English-speaking WP readers will never have seen a movie or read any documents from the time in which mention was made of the occupation, nor seen a movie or television show or read any text set in the past in which the term was used as one touch of realism among many; fourth, that when readers of WP come across a word they do not know, they will not look it up in the dictionary. But since the writer did not wish to eliminate the term carhop and just say "waitress," which would have been fine, they elected instead to add "waitress" to make the opaque term a little less opaque, ignoring the fact that "waitress" is already a part of the meaning of the term, just as "player" is already a part of the meaning "goalie."

Unfortunately, if you think that readers will not know the term carhop, and if you think that its use with the expression "at Simon's Drive-In" will not suffice to give a clear indication of what a carhop does, you would be wrong in thinking that the addition of "waitress" will help, because it does not explain what car-hopping is.

Since the uselessness of the term "waitress" will not be apparent, an analogy will help. Suppose that, in a first draft of an article, I wrote this sentence:


 * Any board member who expected to be absent on the day of a vote would be sure to contact his proxy.

And then suppose that, while revising, it occurred to me that readers might not know the meaning of the word proxy and that, acting on the same presumption that people do not consult dictionaries, I revised the sentence so that it ran so:


 * Any board member who expected to be absent on the day of a vote would be sure to contact his proxy representative.

The addition of the term representative cannot help: if you don't know what a proxy is, then you cannot tell whether the representative represents the proxy, or whether the proxy representative is someone else on the board who represents the board member whenever they need representing, or what.

In general, it makes no sense to presume that words that occur only in a highly restricted context will be unfamiliar to people, for it is not reasonable to presume that a restricted context is an unfamiliar one. The word bailiff is used only in the highly restricted context of court proceedings, but that context is familiar to everyone.

If you are tempted to argue that one cannot presume—most people say "assume," but that is not the proper word to denote a universal supposition—what contexts are familiar, then you're in trouble, since a moment's reflection will show that the writer writes in using, and indeed must use, several presumptions about what is familiar. Doesn't the writer expect readers to know what circa means? That's used in a restricted context. Doesn't the writer also expect readers both to know what cocktails are and that it was not at Simon's Drive-in that Storm worked as a cocktail waitress? "Cocktail" is used only in the context of high-toned or pretentious gatherings, which aren't very many at all, but they're familiar, aren't they? Doesn't the writer expect readers to know with respect to which job seventeen counted as "underage"? "Underage" isn't used in all the contexts in which somebody is too young for something, and is in fact used only in the few contexts in which it is not just the case that somebody is too young for something, but it is also the case that the too young will try to get that something and those who are supposed to keep them from succeeding are tempted to ignore the fact that they are too young—but all these contexts are familiar, aren't they?

If you wanted to explain everything that might be unfamiliar, you would have a passage that ran like this:


 * In Los Angeles city circa about 1945 in the western calendar at age 17, Storm worked as a carhop waitress at Simon's Drive-In restaurant for people to get served in their cars and then as a cocktail drink waitress at a cocktail drink lounge club, though still underage for legal employment at this last position because the legal drinking age at the time was twenty-one.

Clearly, if a subject matter is not the province of a specialist, and one writes good concrete prose that contextualizes all one's information, then such writing is never necessary.

Since for those who have some acquaintance with history carhop waitress is an outrageous pleonasm, like goalie player, and since it is simply bad writing to use a word you don't expect your readers to understand, but equally bad writing to use expressions that are unintelligible, and since it is not reasonable to write for people who don't want to accept the fact that there are far more things that they do not know than they do, and that most people aren't going to take the trouble even to imagine what it is that people might not know, good sense requires the sentence to run so:


 * In Los Angeles circa 1945 at age 17, Storm worked as a carhop at Simon's Drive-In and then as a cocktail waitress, though still underage.

The sentence is still weak, but at least it no longer suffers from the blemish of pleonasm—a sure sign that the writer doesn't know what his words mean, and so can't be trusted to use the proper word to capture realities. Wordwright (talk) 06:41, 27 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Whilst carhop waitress is a pleonasm, it is also an idiom in common use in the same way as tuna fish and burning fire are. In the UK, where there was never a drive-in culture, carhop is not a well known term and the addition of waitress gives clarity to Tempest Storm's job at that time. I would add that I find your last sentence quite insulting to whoever originally wrote that particular piece of text in the article. --John B123 (talk) 16:15, 27 May 2020 (UTC)

Elvis Presley, John Kennedy
No mentions? 50.111.50.145 (talk) 08:45, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Categories
Why Category:21st-century American women, and why not Category:20th-century American women? Her active carreer was in the 20th. --2003:6:33AE:3D13:38E1:4628:9FA5:B14D (talk) 06:01, 28 February 2024 (UTC)