DISHING

Did you ever see the movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers? I mean, the first one, the one from 1956. I know there have been others; there was that recent one starring Nicole Kidman. But the one from 1956 starring Kevin McCarthy is pretty much indelible and iconic. You should know the story: Alien seed pods come to Earth and sprout a life form that grows emotionless simulacra of human beings, replacing the subject while the person is sleeping. I know I’m not the only person who uses The Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a verbal shorthand for any situation in which someone is apparently acting out of character. You know, someone is doing something you wouldn’t expect of him, and you immediately want to ask, “Okay, where’s the pod?”

I thought of that one day many years ago when I found my mother watching Cable TV. For years when my sister and I were growing up, Mom refused to get Cable. We begged and pleaded and wheedled and argued, but she wouldn’t spring for it. For that matter, it was years before she would finally break down and get touch-tone telephone; I used to be embarrassed when people came to the house and wanted to use the phone and found themselves dialing on a push-button rotary. My mother isn’t really into technology. Some time I should share with you some of her experiences with the computer my brother bought her one Christmas. But anyway, one day I found she had had Cable TV put in, and I wanted to tear the house apart and turn over all the furniture looking for the pod. She had signed on with a cable system that used dish receivers. It wasn’t an actual satellite company like Direct TV; it was a dish cable company that eventually went out of business because it couldn’t compete with Time Warner. Over time she had the worst troubles with it: signals getting lost, and so forth. And they used to tell her to adjust her reception by climbing up onto the roof and changing the angle of the dish! This is a familiar story for many dish subscribers; it’s used as an argument against dish services in commercials for Cable services. At the time, my Mom was pushing 80 years old, and you can imagine the unlikely tableau of a nearly 80-year-old black lady climbing up on her roof to adjust her Cable dish. This wasn’t happening. Eventually she broke down and went to Time Warner, having the dish removed. I still wanted to look for the pod.

My mother was an English teacher before she retired (and got the Cable service that she refused to spring for when she was working). Sometimes we talk about the ways in which people mangle the English language. Not being up on technology, she may not be that savvy about some of the ways people abbreviate things online. (She now refuses to use the Internet because she’s married to her telephone line and doesn’t want to spring for DSL or Broadband. We got her the Internet for a while, but she wouldn’t use it because she thought it was more complicated than it is and because she was afraid of people not being able to call her. The more things change, the more they remain the same.) I wonder what she would say about abbreviations that people would use as Web shorthand, like “directtv” or “directv”. It’s like the way people change two words into one word in tech talk by pushing them together but keeping the capitalization, as in “TimeWarner”. She’d probably take a dim view of that. I don’t blame her, really; part of her influence on me is that I’m a bit of an English language purist myself. The “scrunching” of two-word expressions with a capital in the middle is something that has always made me a little uncomfortable. I like to think the pod people would just scratch their heads in bewilderment at it.