Sunday, April 26, 2009

Moving Picture Show

You know what word I've always really liked? "Movie." It's kinda cute, isn't it? I never call them "films." Obviously, a lot of them aren't. With the unfortunate but understandable digital craze of the modern world, many "films" are more like "memory cards" or "files" or some other term that I can only hope will never catch on, and even the movies that were originally filmed on film are watched on disc or downloaded or ethereally streamed. To refer to an intangible concept like a movie or a song by the name of its physical medium is to ignore the invariability with which recordable concepts will outlast the technology which house them.

Even if films were always films, though, I'd still vastly prefer movie. Why? Three reasons:

1. It's fun to say. Go on, try it. Movie, movie, mooooooovieeeeeeeee!

2. The meaning. What's a movie? Well, it's not a stillie. Modern vernacular may have left "talkies" by the wayside, but movies have survived, and I like that. Not only has "movie" survived; it's fully accepted. Tell someone you want to go see a talkie and they'll tell you to stop being an idiot. Movies, on the other hand, are totally fine, despite the word having the same meaning and being every bit as ridiculous.

3. It makes that one joke about where cows like to go on Saturday nights possible.

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