Funny Word Article Reader

One evening some years ago, I was at a fashionable restaurant on a busy street. While I fully anticipated a mouth-watering, stomach-filling, calorie-supplying meal, I got something in addition to that: a most entertaining lesson in the modern-day nomenclature of things.

As we walked towards the entrance, six would-be gorgers, famished but trying to look genteel, a young man hopped out from behind a counter at the door and asked, ‘Name, sir?’

I gave it to him.

‘Table for?’

‘Six.’

He smiled apologetically. ‘Please wait just ten minutes, sir.’ Genteel souls do not argue with reason, so we nodded and took our seats – placed safely outside the restaurant where we could exert no pressure on those fortunate enough to be inside – and looked around. The first thing that caught my eye was the fact that the counter behind which our friend stood had a name. I looked at the shiny plaque that said: GREETER STAND.

So the man had a name. Greeter: one who greets. How enchantingly simple! But that was not all. A few feet away stood a similar counter, this one bearing a plaque that said, totally hyphenless, ‘Take Away Counter’. We would have loved to comply, but it would have been quite a job lugging it around. Besides, we were famished.

Our ‘greeter’ brought us our menu cards. At the end of several colourful pages, each with photographs of dishes and ‘combos’, I saw this line: ‘As concerns further clarification/explanation, your order taker will be glad to help.’

Order taker: one who takes your order. I put down my menu with a sigh. It was no longer something I could brush away as an aberration; I really was behind the times. I must learn the new lingo.

~

Days later, I was consumed by the philosophy. What a godsend to society, this wonderful system of naming!

Picture for yourself what I imagined that day.

Early in the morning, you hear the footsteps of your newspaper-deliverer, and the thump of the paper as it lands outside your front door. You pick up your mug of coffee, glance at the headlines, and switch on the programme-displayer, searching absently for the channel-changer. You soon realise that there’s nothing much on any of the channels, and the thrill of pressing buttons on your channel-changer wears off after about ten minutes. You now want to get going for work, so you turn on the bucket-filler in the bathroom.

Neatly dressed, you step out into the floor-changer and descend to the ground floor, where your chauffeur (some old terms, unfortunately, must persist) opens your car door for you, and you are on your way to another day at the office. The last person you want to meet today is your infernal salary-payer, but, well, you don’t have much of a choice.

So you pick out a magazine, hoping to relax, and you come across a most irritating piece by a smart-alecky article-writer. And so, for the moment, you’re the Funny Word Article Reader.

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