The Twilight Sentinel

"The Twilight Sentinel!" Is it ... a costumed do-gooder intent on heroism? The last hope of a dying world? The beanie baby of a new era? No. It's a setting on my car. When it gets dark outside, the "Twilight Sentinel" makes sure my Buick LeSabre headlights automatically turn on. I haven't written much lately because my wife, I, and my twilight sentinel went on a road trip to visit family.

It is rather handy to have a car function that relieves me from the worry, "Should I turn on the headlights now? What about now? What if I should wait five minutes?" and it is fitting that such a car function have a wickedly cool name. But think how many car parts do not have such a cool name despite filling important functions. Too many people take their car stereo system CD players for granted by calling them "CD players." If I had one, I would call it "The Jamminator." Heck, if I had a working cassette deck in my car, I might call it "Guardian of the Soundwaves," rather than its current name, "Piece of Crap that Taunts Me with Perpetual Silence."

We may often laugh at our culture's habit of euphemism and of making people or jobs seem better than they are--calling people who collect the garbage "sanitation workers," or the Keeping up Appearances character who pronounces her last name "boquet" when it is spelled "bucket." But you could see this "habit of euphemism" as a reaction to what I'll call a "habit of malphemism," where we make things seem worse than they are. The fact that musicians can permanently record their work, that we can listen to them while we're traveling, and we can skip to the songs we like on a CD player, would have seemed several centuries ago like nothing short of miraculous--or, at the very least, diabolical. Our sense of wonder has become deadened. We are not surprised that a car can move and can even judge when to turn on our lights; rather, we're surprised that someone would give this function the seemingly grandiose title of the "Twilight Sentinel."

If anyone would like to renew our sense of wonder by thinking of a grandiose title for Leopoldtulip, let me know.