Black Friday, Cyber Monday… it’s all a bit Star Wars, isn’t it? What will they come up with next, Wookiee Wednesday? So I refused to get drawn in this year, preferring to spend over the odds on my Christmas presents. I’m no fool.
My more pressing concern was laying my hands on an Advent calendar on the 1st December. Don’t you find that Advent can creep up on you and take you by surprise? Someone should come up with a countdown of some kind so we can all see it coming in good time.
Anyway, I assumed that my favourite supermarket would have a bargain bin full of them, or that there would be a stack of them on that ‘discounted items’ shelf where they put the buns that are about to go stale and the unusual women’s toiletries and the tins of chopped carrots and peas that even the harvest festival brigade rejected.
But no. I’d barely got the word ‘Advent’ out when I was greeted with nothing more than a sympathetic shrug from a woman who looked like she’d been employed specifically to give sympathetic shrugs to people asking for Advent calendars. She did it very well, I have to say. So this year the kids are going to have to cope with the run-up to Christmas with nothing to help them through but the thrill of anticipation and the spirit of goodwill. Tricky, I know, but when I was a child, Advent calendars had nothing behind the doors but a picture of a manger or a donkey or something, and that was more than enough to keep the excitement at boiling point for the full 24 days.
Different times.
So while I was quite pleased not to be force feeding chocolate to my progeny accordingly to a prescribed timetable, my supermarket knock-back did send me into a bit of a trance and I left the shop with the word ‘bargain’ spiralling round the inside of my head. So fixated did I become with the word that I nearly forgot the cat food.
Do you ever get that with words, where the more you say them the more unfamiliar they sound until you become almost hypnotised by them? No? Well, I do so I’ll carry on. And what obsessed me about ‘bargain’ was the way we pronounce it. What other words ending in ‘ain’ do we pronounce ‘in’? OK, apart from ‘captain’. And ‘mountain’. Yes alright, and ‘chaplain’.
In return I offer you ‘plain’, ‘gain’, ‘grain’, ‘pain’, ‘Spain’, ‘train’. And it’s not just the monosyllabic words: ‘terrain’, ‘contain’, ‘explain’, ‘disdain’, ‘sustain’, ‘porcelain’… I rest my case.
There is no logical explanation for why we pronounce these words differently, any more than there is for a supermarket that turns nearly 9,000 tons of surplus food into animal feed every year not having a surplus Advent calendar on the first day of Advent. I mean, one measley Advent calendar!
Still, at least I got the word ‘bargain’ out of my head.
