I wonder ...

Sometimes I find myself wondering about odd things. Some of these probably have a straightforward answer (and I could probably google it, but I don’t really want to). Others are just items of curiosity for which there probably is no real answer. For instance,

I wonder what happened to the tree swing I saw a couple of months ago (see “Ode to a Cottonwood”). Did someone move it to another tree? Did someone decide it wasn't safe, so they took it down? Did someone cut the rope just for the heck of it?

I wonder why it smells like natural gas in the mall early in the morning. Is it because all the fast-food places have been closed, so the gas that they usually burn off has accumulated and is sitting around in noxious clouds? Or is the smell there all the time, but usually it’s masked by other smells during the day?

I wonder why they mow a strip along each side of the bike path where it passes through open space. Is it to keep tiny creatures that live in the tall grass off the path? Is it so doggies have a place to sniff (etc.) that’s off the path but still out of the tall grass?

I wonder what will replace old idioms that don’t work anymore because technology has changed the world. They made sense in their time, but the things they referred to are going or gone. For instance, how long will people know what we mean when we say:

• Dial the phone. Left over from the days of rotary dials. This should be gone soon, but what will replace it? “Button the phone”? “Touch screen the phone”? “Speak to your phone”?

• Roll down the window. Remember when car windows were raised and lowered by a manual crank? Now that they’re all electric, push-button gizmos, what will we say instead? Also, what will replace the gesture that asks someone to roll down the window so you can tell them something. What gesture would say, “Open your window with that electric button”?

• Groovy. Just about gone, along with the vinyl records that gave it birth. What will be the equivalent word? “Diggy”? (I actually tried to start this as a trend once. “Diggy” was intended to signal the change from groves to digital data. A friend from the east coast promised to get it started there, and I was to do it here in the west. Didn’t work, but it was an interesting experiment.)

• Disk jockey. How can someone be a genuine disk jockey when there are no disks (See “groovy,” above)? So are they “button jockeys”? Somehow, this doesn’t work. The visual just isn’t as groovy.