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 11th 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.
