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2002-04-19 9:55

Pre-emptive counter-snobbery

Pre-emptive Counter Snobbery

I woke up this morning convinced I'd overslept. I don't have official working hours as such - this is a University - but I do like to be in before eleven and I swear the clock said it was after ten. When I got out of the house, though, the sun looked really low in the sky for that time of the morning and when I looked at my watch (the strap is broken so it lives in a jacket pocket, and is rarely consulted) it was really just after seven.

Sometimes I think that my fetish for proper wind-up clockwork alarm clocks is more trouble than it's worth: they keep lousy time; they run down (I still sometimes forget to wind them); they are mechanically unreliable (I'm on my fourth); and I can't really tell the time on analogue clocks anyway (I had an analogue watch briefly. It was a nightmare). But I can't bring myself to accept the idea of any other kind; if it doesn't have two bells on top and a little hammer to strike them alternately then it isn't really an alarm clock.

I was at the Starbucks near work shortly after they opened at half-seven and boy, did I need a coffee. They make you work for it at Starbucks, though; you can't just ask for a large coffee, you have to use the magic word venti. I take my revenge by pronouncing latte with the vowel sound of (RP British) English cat. They hate that; they always repeat it back to me with the proper Italian vowel. But my own sense of superiority is undented; it's an English word, now, and my pronunciation makes a lot more sense within the phonological framework of (RP British) English. "Hah!" as we used to say in my youth, "Thus I refute your refutation." We didn't get out much then, either.

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