Not so long ago I could memorise the names of the hundreds of students I met in the course of a year in next to no time, and remember them from one year to the next. Later, in my first years as a translator, I did not very often have to resort to the dictionary to remind myself of words I had already learnt.
But then the rot began to set in. With the advent of the electronic dictionary, it became so easy to transfer the task of memorising from the brain to the hard disc, itself the ancestor of the cloud. Pretty soon, I was using the dictionary as a crutch, looking up words I already knew. But that was only part of the story, for at the same time my brain was becoming saturated with words. Unfortunately, once your or at least my brain is full, it's full. You cannot make more space for yourself by downloading part of your memory onto your hard disk. I'm sorry, I'm afraid I've lost control of this analogy. The only solution is to get a new brain.
Of course, it's not just that the brain, like a hard disc, becomes saturated; it also DETERIORATES (again like a hard disc), and I have now reached a stage when and where I am incapable of retaining a new item of information for any length of time. For example, you would think that even I would know what the common financial initials "IPO" stands for. Goodness knows I've looked it up often enough, and indeed I have just done so again, but I know full well that come tomorrow I will have forgotten that it means Initial Public Offering. In my mind, it will always stand for "Impersonating a Police Officer". The IPO mob, led I think by Peter Sellers, spread panic in the Metropolitan Police Force, in particular Lionel Jeffries, in that wonderful Boulting Brothers comedy, The Wrong Arm of The Law.
But then the rot began to set in. With the advent of the electronic dictionary, it became so easy to transfer the task of memorising from the brain to the hard disc, itself the ancestor of the cloud. Pretty soon, I was using the dictionary as a crutch, looking up words I already knew. But that was only part of the story, for at the same time my brain was becoming saturated with words. Unfortunately, once your or at least my brain is full, it's full. You cannot make more space for yourself by downloading part of your memory onto your hard disk. I'm sorry, I'm afraid I've lost control of this analogy. The only solution is to get a new brain.
Of course, it's not just that the brain, like a hard disc, becomes saturated; it also DETERIORATES (again like a hard disc), and I have now reached a stage when and where I am incapable of retaining a new item of information for any length of time. For example, you would think that even I would know what the common financial initials "IPO" stands for. Goodness knows I've looked it up often enough, and indeed I have just done so again, but I know full well that come tomorrow I will have forgotten that it means Initial Public Offering. In my mind, it will always stand for "Impersonating a Police Officer". The IPO mob, led I think by Peter Sellers, spread panic in the Metropolitan Police Force, in particular Lionel Jeffries, in that wonderful Boulting Brothers comedy, The Wrong Arm of The Law.
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