This year is ripe for new time-based metaphors - Ian McMillan
“I’ll be there before you can say Jack Robinson”, for example, or “I’ll be there in two shakes of a lamb’s tail”. The real Jack Robinson and the original lamb have passed their sell-by date long ago but they linger on in our language when we’re trying to describe something like the passing of time that is really indescribable.
I was thinking about this the other day when I was putting my mask on before I got on the bus to Doncaster. To be honest, I wasn’t making a very good job of it; the bus turned the corner and began to approach and I fiddled the mask out of my pocket with one hand and took my glasses off with the other hand and then wished I’d got three hands because I needed to get my debit card out of my wallet and… well, you know what it’s like.
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Hide AdLuckily the bus driver was a patient soul and waited for me as I got all my (metaphorical) ducks in a row and got on the bus, mask on, glasses off, card in hand and as I got on I realised that I’d invented a new description of time that was apt for these pandemic days. “Will you be long?” “I’ll be there quicker than a poet putting a mask on!”
I think I’m onto something here: phrases reflect the times they’re coined in, and our idioms and sayings are like history books that, if we examine them, can tell us what it was like to live in specific parts of the past. So when the pandemic is, hopefully, a footnote in a textbook, we might still count out minutes in sections called Thursday Night Applause without quite knowing what we mean.
There are so many possibilities for 2020 time-based metaphors. I’ll be there before your test results come. Time passed more slowly than a queue outside the takeaway on a Friday night in June. I’ll be there before you can say Chris Whitty/Dominic Cummings/Van Tam. I’ll be there in two shakes of a government’s policy.
When I went for a Covid test on a sweltering Wednesday in the spring I had the sensation of time passing very slowly as I sat there trying to pluck up courage to stick a cotton bud up my nose. It was as though I was made of stone.
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Hide AdI looked at my phone and no time at all seemed to have passed. A drop of sweat meandered down my face. Time seemed to be taking a tea break, sitting on a bench. “Time passes as slowly as a man in a car waiting to test himself” could enter the language. “Did you have to wait long for them to call back?”
“Yes, time moved like I was sitting there with a cotton bud inches from my nose.” Nobody will know the precise context but everybody will know exactly what you mean. Jack Robinson, eat your heart out, wherever you are.
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