Dichroic Reflections

Friday's linguistic commentary

As I type this I'm wearing a bathing suit, rafting shorts, and a Cool-max shirt I use for rowing, hiking or the gym because it's so lightweight. That wouldn't be at all strange except that I'm in my office. I was going to change until I realized that changing *out* of shorts and *in* to more proper clothing at 3 o'clock on a Friday was just wrong. I did put the shirt back on as a nod to professionalism.

The wettable duds are, of course, because of the company carwash, which for the record did not involved coercion either to wash or to wear skimpy clothing (it wasn't that kind of carwash because it's not that kind of company) but did involved much spraying of hoses, not always directed at cars. I'm still damp and very glad I wore the bathing suit.

I'm also noticing I still write bathing suit, the word I grew up using, which is odd because these days I generally seem to say swimsuit. The latter makes more sense, that being what I call what I do in said suit. It confused the hell out of me when I first came across references to bathing and bathing machines in Alice in Wonderland and other English books. (Actually, the whole idea of bathing machines still confuses the hell out of me. Victorians were weird.) I think, though, that I've changed the word I use mostly due to the influence of news anchors and advertisers, who always (in the USA) use the term "swimsuit".

When I was younger, the two other locutions I noticed them saying differently than people around me did were matters of pronunciation; route pronounced as "rout" (we said "root") and coupon pronounced as "koopon" (we said "kyoopon"). I think I flicker between root and rout depending how I feel, what road I'm actually talking about, and who I'm talking to. Koopon still sounds weird to me, though. Otherwise I don't have much of a Philadelphia accent these days; I don't say wooder for water, keeyan for can, or ayout for out. Hardly ever, anyway.