Pre-boarding

 

Traveling earlier this month to Millersville, PA to be with our daughter and son-in-law to help with their young twins, I encountered another instance of the airlines’ eye-rolling use of language. It’s the concept of pre-boarding—which I take to mean “boarding before we begin boarding.” But I don’t know how they can accomplish that. It’s the equivalent of “eating before you eat” or “sleeping before you sleep.” Supposedly it’s a policy of giving preferential treatment to passengers who bought first class tickets or are traveling with small children or need extra helping getting down the walk-way. But why not call it “preferential boarding”?

If we placed “pre-boarding” in a special category of “pointless” words, it wouldn’t be alone. Think of the road signs sometimes placed before construction. They say, “Be Prepared To Stop.” Well, duh… That’s one of the first things you have drummed into you when learning to drive: Know how to stop this chunk of metal that you’re navigating, subject to the terrifying realties of physics and the knowledge that at 60 mph you’re covering 88 feet per second. Of course you should be prepared to stop—at any time!

OK, I’m overreacting. What the road construction people are saying is, “Be even more ready than usual to stop because we’re just ahead.” Admittedly, that won’t easily fit on a sign.

Still, the wording bugs me, in the same way I get irritated by those instructions we get on some frozen food items: “Do not overheat.” Of course you shouldn’t heat it more than you should heat it.

Back to pre-boarding: What if all those eligible for pre-boarding constituted everyone on the flight, and there was nobody else left to board? Could they still have pre-boarding before no other boarding? I’ll ask and share what I learn.

[300 words]

 

Moo!

 

Three brief reflections, based on word encounters in the past few days.

Moo!

Yesterday Sue and I were at Spokane’s Vanessa Behan crisis nursery, where we have long volunteered by playing with kids or holding crying infants. A cheerful 2-year-old sat on my lap as we read one of those books with pictures of animals. This girl, whose language skills and vocabulary are on the cusp of exploding, latched on to the noise a cow makes. So she and I just kept saying “Moo!” to each other. Her vocabulary will soon burgeon, but for now she has a thorough grasp on the noise a cow makes. Me too.

Kench

On Sunday a friend sent me a list of about twenty “words to revive,” terms that have faded from English usage. Here are three verbs that I’ll add to my collection:

·         Brabble—to argue loudly

·         Jargogle—to confuse things or mix them up, and

·         Kench—to laugh loudly…

I looked up these definitions and confirmed the first two. But Merriam-Webster knew nothing of “kench” and laughter; instead, it defines the word as a noun, “A bin or enclosure in which fish or skins are salted.” Actually, that was my first guess.

Dialing

Over the weekend I read about the way we use outdated concepts to talk about new technologies. It referred to words like dial or a phrase like hang up, concepts from the days of rotary phones that we keep using even though we’re neither dialing anything on our smart phones, nor hanging them up. Or we speak about tuning in to a radio program, when there’s no dial in sight. Likewise, when did you last see a carbon copy of anything? Yet we send emails with blind carbon copies (bcc). Or rewind a digital program….

Time to sign off.

[300 words]