Good day. Welcome back to the A to Z Challenge for 2018. Today’s letter is W and I’ve chosen the word Watch.
Watch is one of those words with many meanings. It can mean to look at something, as in watch a movie or television. It can mean take cars of, as in watch the kids. It can mean to be careful, as in watch out. It can even mean to guard something or someone, as he’s on watch. While those are all excellent and important meanings for the word, the watch I want to talk about is the one that keeps time, the one I wear on my wrist.
The history of timekeeping is fascinating. If you’re interested, you can check it out here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_timekeeping_devices
Where does the word watch as a timepiece come from? Some attribute it to the Old English word, woecce which meant “watchman” because a timepiece was used by them to track the hours. “Eleven of the clock, and all’s well.” As a child, I didn’t carry a watch, but the factory whistle blew at noon and I knew it was time for lunch, at five and that meant it was time for supper, and when it blew again at ten at night, it was curfew–time to get inside and go to bed.
By the sixteenth century, many of the nobility carried clock watches, small mechanical devices pinned on their persons that were powered by winding a mainspring which turned gears that moved hands and kept time by means of a rotating balance wheel. The Swiss excelled at producing these devices and Swiss-made watches are still considered the best.
Today, while some watches still work on that principle, most use a quartz battery, good for at least one year at a time. But it’s not the kind of watch I want to discuss, it’s the fact that I would be absolutely lost without mine.
When I leave the house, I add two jewelry items to my dress–earrings and my watch. I refer to it at least a hundred times a day, and feel naked without it. I check it to make sure I’m on time, to see how long I’ve been waiting, to decide whether or not I have time to do something before I have to be somewhere else, or just to know the time. As I age, I find time seems to move along faster than it did. maybe i check my watch to make sure I’m not losing any of what I have left.
What I don’t understand is how young people today feel that watches are obsolete. “I have my phone,” is the answer they usually give. I do, too, but opening my purse and digging through everything to pull out the phone and check the time is quite simply a waste of time.
No, thank you. I will keep my watch. After all, it’s just a matter of time before I’ll need to check the time again. How about you? Do you use a watch or rely on your phone to be on time?
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