NORTHAMPTON — Don’t let his mayoral campaign slogan fool you. Though the word “faux” appears beside his name, Silas Kopf says he’s for real about his intentions.
Kopf said he chose the phrase “Silas Kopf faux mayor” because the word “faux” is a 15th-century preposition meaning “for.” The Gazette was not able to independently confirm that point.
True to his campaign message, Kopf is already educating the citizens of Northampton on his views about punctuation and linguistics. He took out nomination papers for mayor, but is not yet an official candidate.
“I have the dream of sailing into office on a wave of grammar,” he said Friday.
Kopf, 67, of Stearns Court, is a furniture maker and woodworker who has lived in the city since 1978. And he seems serious about grammar.
“Grammar is the rule of our language and we cannot have civil conversation unless we’re all abiding by the rules,” he said, adding there will be “no dangling participles in this campaign.”
“If we were all on the same grammatical page, we might understand one another a little bit better,” he added.
Kopf asserts we — both as a nation and a city — must break away from the 140-character phenomenon overtaking modern society known as Twitter and make sure we’re educating our children well in the ways of elevated language. And, for grammar’s sake, he said Thornes Marketplace must have an apostrophe.
“It really bugs me that there’s no apostrophe in the sign,” he said. “I think I would use the bully pulpit to get them to add that apostrophe.”
He said he would guard the city’s treasury and avoid spending it on things like a major-league sports enterprise. And it “would be premature for us to build a wall,” he said.
“We have a pretty good natural barrier, there, with the Connecticut River,” he said of the city’s easterly line.
And “I don’t think the people in Williamsburg are particularly threatening at this point.”
Kopf stands beside three other mayoral candidates to take out papers: Roy Martin, John Riley and incumbent David Narkewicz. They have until Monday at 5 p.m. to return their signatures in order to ascend to the ballot.
Amanda Drane can be contacted at adrane@gazettenet.com.