Bits & Pieces

Back in the 1960s when everyone was crazy for the Beatles, my favorite band was the Dave Clark Five.  Their first big hit in the U.S. was a song titled, “Bits & Pieces.”  I thought I would co-opt that title for this post which doesn’t have a singular focus, but rather, contains bits & pieces of my musings on a number of subjects.

Lesley Gore’s obituary was in today’s paper.  She died yesterday, February 16 of lung cancer.  In 1963, 16-year old Lesley hit the pop charts with “It’s My Party,” and followed that with the sequel, “It’s Judy’s Turn to Cry.”  She had other big hits including, “You Don’t Own Me,” “Sunshine, Lollipops” and “Maybe I Know.”  Baby boomers of a certain age won’t be able to read those titles without humming a few bars of Ms. Gore’s infectious tunes.  Rest in peace, Ms. Gore.  Your music will live on.

I grew up as a “yinzer” in an ethnic Pittsburgh household.  Either in spite of or because of that background, I worked hard to learn to speak grammatically correct English as a college student and then later as a lawyer.  I recognize that American English is not static, and we have to allow for its gradual evolution.  So when I hear someone say they are going to “lay down” for a while, I bite my tongue and think, “Maybe it’s not grammatically correct, but perhaps it will be someday.”  However, while recently listening to the radio, I thought I heard several announcers describe upcoming events in “Feb/yoo/ary.”  Way back in second grade, my teacher drilled into our brains that the correct pronunciation of the second month of the year is “Fe/brew/ary.”  Similarly, she insisted that the place to borrow books is a “lie/brary” and not a “lie/berry.”  I couldn’t believe that so many announcers could have skipped second grade, so I quickly checked my Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.  I was amazed - no, astounded - to discover that the preferred pronunciation was exactly what I had been taught was just plain wrong.  I’m not sure when this changed.  I did some quick internet research and couldn’t find any article that pointed to a date or even described a transition from what I had learned to what has become today's norm.  It was as if history had been re-written.  Like a scenario out of Orwell’s 1984, it seemed that Febyooary was always the correct pronunciation.  I checked with my own children and found that they also had gone to the dark side and accepted that the silent ‘r’ is actually something real in the English language.  However, a web search for “silent r” yielded several sites which indicated that there were no American English words with a silent ‘r.’ I’m not sure how to reconcile that result with the current prevalence of Febyooary.  I suppose I could accept it if Merriam-Webster changed the spelling of the second month to Febuary to coincide with its pronunciation.  Or perhaps I just need to do some more research on the subject.  Maybe I should do that at the local liberry.

I started wearing bow ties about twenty years ago.  At first, I had one or two and wore them sparingly on special outings or to church.  I was too self-conscious to wear a bow tie at the office.  Bow ties had somehow gotten a bad reputation.  They branded you as professorial at best or more likely as some kind of nerd, loser or weirdo.  After all, Dagwood Bumstead wears bow ties in the comics as does Garfield’s Jon Arbuckle when the strip’s author is trying to make him look particularly geeky.  Nevertheless, whenever I wore a bow tie, people complimented me on how good I looked.  I never heard the same level of compliment when I showed up anywhere in a necktie.  Then about ten years ago, I screwed up my courage and decided to start wearing bow ties at the office.  I don’t know that they helped my career which had pretty much plateaued by then, but I got a lot of compliments and really felt they suited me.  Over those ten years, I have given increasingly more space on my tie rack to bow ties and less and less to neckties, which I rarely wear except perhaps to a funeral.  Bow ties seem somehow to be too joyous for a somber occasion.  At the same time, I have been gladdened to see that bow ties are having a resurgence.  At a recent meeting I attended, there were more bow ties than neckties.  I would like to take credit for this bow tie renaissance, but I think a lot of the credit has to go to actor Matt Smith.  Mr.Smith, who is most known for his role as the 11^th Doctor on the BBC’s Doctor Who, repeatedly declared, “Bow ties are cool!”  Mr. Smith played the Doctor on the series from 2010 through 2013.  That’s just about the time period when bow ties started showing up in more than a few men’s stores, and men in their twenties started wearing them.  So thank you, Matt Smith, for making bow ties cool again, and me at least by association.  Mr. Smith as the Doctor also declared that fezzes are cool.  I’ve been a hat wearer for many years.  Maybe it’s high time I went looking for a fez.