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I adore words. Dictionaries and thesauruses for me are entertainment enough for any rainy day. Actually, any day at all. I’ll show you why. Let’s look up the word 'sumpsimus':
1. Adherence to or persistence in using a strictly correct term, holding to a precise practice, etc., as a rejection of an erroneous but more common form (opposed to mumpsimus).
2. A person who is obstinate or zealous about such strict correctness (opposed to mumpsimus).
And there, waving at you amidst the linguistic cipher to 'sumpsimus' , is another strange looking word: 'mumpsimus'. Off we go again:
1. Adherence to or persistence in an erroneous use of language, memorization, practice, belief, etc., out of habit or obstinacy.
2. A person who persists in a mistaken expression or practice.
And, depending on what words you know, perhaps you may look up 'erroneous' or 'obstinacy'. I don’t need to as I am never erroneous, and, as you can see, am not in the least obstinate. Am I???
For me, words are colour. I would always prefer to read a book before I see the film adaptation. That way I am able to direct and produce my own mental film adaptation, not sullied by any irritatingly cardboard Hollywood A-listers cast as the lead roles, nor damaged by seemingly inexplicable alterations or omissions from the original text. (Nobody mention the war. The Trojan War that is.)
The rise of blogging, in some ways, proves that modern society embraces and enjoys words as much as any other. But in other ways it shows a shift to the contrary. Even in the few blogs that I have written, the best received pieces are those with photos. A screen full of words is not what many people feel up to reading in their lunch hour or en route home.
I’m not saying it’s because people dislike words (the fact that adult novels or non-fiction books are generally un-illustrated proves an acceptance of words) but photographs or visual stimuli seem to help get the creative juices flowing. They oil the cerebral clogs that grind and crunch the text to spit out the other side a mental image.
It was an article on the Guardian website that got me thinking about the interaction between words, images and our minds. Seemingly some restaurants have taken it upon themselves to ban photography so voracious is the plague of bloggers nowadays, armed with smartphones and cameras, drooling over the thought of their next blog.
The idea of taking photographs whilst (or before) eating in a public place is something that makes me twitch, both with nervousness for fear of remonstrating waiters or restaurant managers, and with unease at the incongruence of the action and the occasion. It breaks the mood of the meal, whatever that mood may be, by whipping out a phone or camera and snapping, swivelling the plate, prodding the food, lighting the scene with another electronic device then snapping again.
Eating out should be about, wait for it, eating. And if the experience is one that blows you away, for good or bad reasons, then record it mentally and express it verbally. Endlessly photographing your food is like visiting a foreign country and watching it through the lens of your camera or i-pad. More and more I see tourists wandering around looking at where they are going through their i-pad. And for reasons that won’t fit into this blog, I find it utterly depressing.
Snapping before or whilst eating at home, however, is another matter – it’s your home, or perhaps a friend’s home, and the food has probably either been made by you or made for you by somebody you know, so go nuts.
Perhaps that’s the root of it – that when I eat out, even in a café, I am eating something that someone has made for me, someone I don’t know, and for that I feel a certain amount of respect or appreciation is due. It’s for the same reason that I don’t take phone calls whilst in public eating places (coffee shops don’t count), and the same reason I don’t belch, parp, swear (loudly), pick my spots, lick my knife or have an argument or raucously shriek with delight with my companions.
Go ahead, call me a prude.
As the article points out, before people got obsessed with blogging about food (the reason this ban has come into effect), restaurants banned what was the problem of that time: using or talking on mobile phones. It is not uncommon, nor is it something people get uppity about anymore, to see a sign asking for phones not to be used in restaurants. We accept it now, but maybe when it first came out it provoked a hullabaloo from outraged diners.
Those polite requests for guests not to use their mobile phones are, in fact, something I spot with delight – “joy upon joy!”, I think, a meal during which the sounds permeating my ears will be the bibble-babble of chatter; chinks and tings of moving glasses and plates; the odd spontaneous explosion of laughter from a happy table; my own munching; perhaps also my companion’s delighted grunting or crunching – and absolutely no tings, bings, or rings from polyphonic hand-held mobile communicative devices.
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