Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Does anyone really know what time it is?
The other day, a woman told me she’d spent $40 to replace a watch battery. When my face displayed obvious shock, she went on to explain that the watch was a Movado...apparently, a very expensive brand.
Question #1: Why would anyone need a watch that costs more than, say, ten or fifteen dollars?
Question #2: If time is merely a human construct, why would anyone need a watch?
Speaking of time: The Chicago White Sox will start all their home games in 2007 at a new time: 7:11 p.m. Why? Well, they’ve sold the rights to 7-Eleven for $500,000 a year, e.g. “White Sox starting time brought to you by 7-Eleven.” Margaret Chabris, a 7-Eleven spokeswoman, said: “Every time the media announces the game’s start time it will be a gentle reminder of our sponsorship.”
Still speaking of time: Some have said the Hopi Indians have a fundamentally different concept of time (translation: inferior to “ours"). Benjamin Lee Whorf, an amateur scholar of Native American Languages, wrote that the Hopi language contains “no words, grammatical forms, constructions, or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time,’ or to past, or future, or enduring or lasting.” Whorf insisted that the Hopi focus not on time but on change and process itself. Apparently, Whorf never encountered this sentence, translated from Hopi: Then indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning at the hour when people pray to the sun, around that time he woke up the girl again.
Speaking of myths: Eskimos don’t use more words for “snow” than English speakers. Cunning linguist Steven Pinker calls it the “Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.” Eskimos do not, he explains, have four hundred words for “snow.” In fact, one dictionary puts the figure at two...while some experts can come up with roughly a dozen. “By such standards,” Pinker says, “English would not be far behind, with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche, hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, and dusting.”
Completely unrelated: The Great Lakes are like a giant toilet.
Copyright © 2005-2007 Mickey Z.
