How do you understand the "celebrity of sorts" in this sentence? and why sorts, not sort? In 1902, William Phelps Eno, who became known as “the first traffic technician in the world,” set about untangling the strangling miasma that was New York City’s streets. Eno proposed a series of “radical ordinances”to rein in New York ‘s traffic, a plan that seems hopelessly quaint now, with instructions such as the “right way to turn a corner.” But Eno , who became a global celebrity of sorts, boating off to Paris and Sao Paulo to solve local traffic problems, was as much a social engineer as a traffic engineer, teaching vast numbers of people to act and communicate in new ways, often against their will.