Politicians and cheap watches tick-tock away
THE ENGLISH language changes from year to year and always, miraculously, manages to keep pace with the rapidly changing world. When I was growing up we had a common phrase: “Oh don’t listen to him. He lies like a cheap watch.” The point of this was that cheap watches were not particularly reliable. They were mechanical and needed to be wound every day. A good one, made by a Swiss craftsman with infinite care, cost a fortune and told accurate time.
The kind of watch you bought in a general dealer’s store for a few rands told reasonably accurate time. If you left it untended for a couple of days it offered a version of the time that was not always close to the honest version. (I don’t know why this reminds me of politicians, but that’s neither here nor there.)
One of the great breakthroughs in timekeeping was the invention of the ship’s chronometer, designed by a man called John Harrison in 1760.
This took the guesswork out of calculating the ship’s longitude. The interesting thing about Harrison’s chronometer is not that it was completely accurate, but that it was consistently inaccurate.
If you knew how many seconds a day it lost or gained, you could calculate the exact time. A great portion of every navigator’s education was devoted to calculating the time.
All that means nothing today, when cheap watches have quartz movements and no longer lie.
In any case, not many navigators care about accurate time today. They just fire up the GPS and it shows exactly where they are. But I like cheap watches.
I have a collection of them and I added to it when my daughter’s cat stole the old one in Canada recently and I simply popped down to a store and bought a new one for $9.99 (about R100). (I later found the old one. The cat had tucked it into a shopping bag.)
The five very cheap watches in my bedside table drawer are amazingly accurate. From time to time I check them against the time on my computer screen and they stay true to the second. None of them cost more than R100.
Of course this raises a question for the linguists. What’s the modern equivalent of “you lie like a cheap watch”?
I suppose it’s not such a major problem for South African students of English. Just pick a politician and there’s your answer.
Last Laugh
A city motorist was travelling along a winding country lane when he saw a farmer in a field, milking a cow that was tethered to an apple tree.
“Excuse me,” said the motorist. “Can you tell me the right time. My watch has stopped.”
The farmer placed one hand gently under the udder of the cow he was milking and raised it for a few seconds, then he announced: “It’s 20 minutes to five.” The motorist was impressed. “You country folk have a wonderful understanding of animals,” he said, “I am amazed that you can tell the time simply by feeling that cow’s udder. I suppose it depends on the amount of milk inside, or the temperature of the cow?”
“No,” said the farmer, “when I lift the cow’s udder I can look underneath and see the clock on the village church steeple across the valley.”