#350 Lowering the Bar

The cool thing about language is it evolves. And it appears to have no intelligent design. A new word is created or an old word is modified and suddenly a whole new meaning emerges and passes into ordinarily communication. Like the new unit of measurement—bars. Bars denote an entirely arbitrary and unregulated amount of measurement. Kind of like calories. A calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise a gram of water up one degree of centigrade. I think. Truth is, I have no idea. But that doesn’t matter because as long as everyone agrees on this amount of energy all is good. And as long as I can reliably expect that more than 2500 calories a day is gonna thicken my waistline I’m okay with a energy bar having 170 calories or a frozen pizza having 1200. Of course, as everyone who’s made a steady diet of Ben and Jerry’s knows, all calories are not alike, and the net calories saved after digestion is the real thick in the pants. A pound of potatoes and a pound of meat metabolize differently. Another example is conversion to the metric scale. Do we really care that there’s 2.2 ponds to a kilo? It doesn’t matter to me if my energy drink is a liter or 33 ounces. It fills me up one way or the other. It’s just when I have to convert back and forth that it bugs me. I say forget about conversion slowly over decades. Just do the dang thing and adjust. When they first came out with 2 liter bottles of Coke were moms across the land getting out their measuring cups and doling out drinks in 12-ounce increments? Heck no, they just poured enough in a glass or a cup or a tumbler to shut little Johnny up.
So it is with bars. Ultimately, bars don’t have to mean anything. And interestingly, a new handheld electronic device of mine, which I hesitate to admit I finally broke down and purchased, actually has two separate sets of bars—bars for the battery and bars for the signal strength. When the salesman, excuse me Sales, sold it to me he said “coverage is great, look at the bars on the screen.” And sure enough an upwards-angling series of bars indicated that the signal was strong. I had four bars. “How long does the battery you put in last?” I asked, “Do I have to take is right home and charge it?” “No,” he said confidently, “it comes with enough charge so you can program it and stuff. See, it has two bars.” He was right. There was a little battery-like shape where he pointed and it had two bars in it. Wow, I used to hang out in bars now I carry two sets of them in my cellph— hand held electronic communication device. Too many bars used to mean I’d end up in a cell. Now having a cell with lots of bars is a good thing. Funny, one cell trapped you with bars and the other frees you with its convenience. Of course, one could say one of the cells frees you to be alone in privacy and the other traps you into always being reachable. So, this idiot walks into a bar…
America, ya gotta love it.