When you’re a kid, it’s easy to think that old people are stupid. Now that I’m – well, not the kid any more – I see things a little differently.
So what, if a person pronounces “Chipotle” with a long E sound at the end, instead of “Chi-pot-LAY.”
Does it really matter? The way my boys carry on, you’d think they were bleeding from the ears, but honestly, I don’t see what the fuss is about. It’s not as if either pronunciation were likely to be correct.
“So,” I said, “You have it straight from the mouths of the ancient Nahuatl Aztecs how it’s really pronounced?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“That’s whose word it is; I thought you knew. It means ‘smoked jalapeno pepper’….”
I was talking to myself; they were already out the door.
Or say that you, like the late Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), had described the internet as “a series of tubes.”
“That’s clearly wrong,” sneered all the hipsters. This, from people who with their very next un-ironic breath, will tell you they have stored all their data “in a cloud.” Well, if that’s a cloud, I’m a chipotle pepper.
I confess that my understanding of technology stopped with the typewriter ribbon. I have trouble comprehending any machine that doesn’t have moving parts – or perhaps I should say, when the parts that move are only visible under an electron microscope, which I imagine is something like a real microscope, except much, much smaller.
Back in the halcyon days of pen and paper, I had an office calendar with a witty saying for every month. One of my favorites was, “When they call something ‘automatic,’ all they mean is you can’t fix it yourself.”
Another one was, “Today’s folly just might be tomorrow’s wisdom.”
Take, for example, the case of James Thurber’s grandmother. Way back in 1933, the man who invented Walter Mitty described his mother’s mother as spending “the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.” His tone was not one of admiration. She was convinced that it “leaked out of empty (light) sockets if the wall switch had been left on.” He made comic hay of the way she went around the house, screwing in light bulbs, “happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but a dangerous leakage. Nothing could ever clear this up for her.”
I read this essay in my high school English class, and smirked right along with Thurber. Then I sauntered down the hall to my class on Electricity, which reinforced the point that, barring the power of a lightning bolt, electricity simply will not flow if there’s a break in a circuit. It certainly isn’t going to “drip” out of an empty light socket.
Which is why I was so astonished, recently, to stumble across an article that seemed to say precisely that. A collection of Homeowner’s Tips suggested that people could save a lot of money by unplugging all their phone chargers from the wall when they weren’t in use. “Even just sitting there,” it said, “phone chargers are expensive little energy hogs.”
How could that be, I wondered? How could they be using any energy at all? They’re just sitting there, as idle and as empty as James Thurber’s grandmother’s light sockets. Could it be that the old lady was right all along, and electrons really were leaking invisibly into the Thurber family home? And is that happening in my home, too?
It turns out that, according to my husband the electrical engineer, the chargers are only drawing power because they contain little transformers – or, as he corrected me, “switching power supplies” – that reduce the house current to something that won’t fry a cell phone’s little silicon brain. But it means that the “house” side of a phone charger is actually always on, as long as it’s plugged into the wall. Who knew?!
Now, I’m certainly not crawling around behind furniture and under beds to plug and unplug those things twice a day. The few pennies I might save would be more than used up in buying myself a new pair of knees.
But the point remains – who’s going to apologize to Thurber’s grandma?
I can only hope, when he joined his ancestors wherever humorists and their long-suffering families are allowed to go, that she forgave him. Maybe she even allowed him to sit, for a while, on her cloud.
