On Adapting to Adaptors

A few months back (or was it years?), I had posted an article on anomia where you can’t recall the names of objects or individuals. Now it’s the time to write about misnomers where the names of things (and in many cases people) don’t suit them at all. I don’t intend to discuss the ill-matched names of individuals as I am not interested in turning friends to foes. Besides, the memory space of my PC would not permit such a long word document.

So, let me stick to the inanimate world. The immediate cause for this article is a petty incident. One evening, I found that my laptop which I had placed on a low chair for charging had fallen off along with the adaptor.

And I thought that to err is human, to forgive is divine and to revenge is devilish.  Well, evidently my laptop didn’t believe in this or preferred to be devilish and turned vindictive on me. Can’t say it stopped functioning, it only refused to get charged. And so it turned out that the vengeful Hamlet was not my laptop but its adaptor. Apparently, it didn’t take easily the fall that befell it, proving to be a misfit for the term adaptor.

I wonder who named the adaptor so, if it can’t even survive a fall from a 1-foot-high chair. It doesn’t show any sign of adaptability, always cribbing and sulking at the drop of a hat….even a drop from a chair. Or does the name indicate that it makes the user get adapted to all its pranks and whims and fancies

I know it has been termed so as it connects electrical equipment to a power supply or for connecting different pieces of electrical and electronic equipment together. That means it gets others well-adapted. In that case, it should be called adaptator (I have already communicated this to the lexicographers at Oxford).

I came to realise the extent of its mal-adaptability when I went shopping for a new one – the fall proved to be quite a pinch in my pocket. There were so many features to be considered- brand, model, make, voltage, wattage and so on and so forth. If one of this a mismatch,…phew ….goes the adaptor’s adaptability. Hey…even I am a better adaptor than that. I don’t stop functioning on falling from a 1-foot-high chair. I survive that almost daily.

All of us are great adaptors. Man has proved himself suitable to survive in the wildest jungles, highest mountains, deepest trenches, darkest mines and hottest deserts. He has already shown his adaptability in the space ships with zero gravity. But seldom do we realise this potential of ours. More often than not, we prove ourselves to be great adaptors even unawarely without giving it a thought. Life evolves into a string of adaptations, happiness depending on how well and how easily you adapt.

I feel the human race has been blessed with a humungous share of this quality a greater part of it in the mind which then drives the body. This leads us through the thick and thin of life, moments of crisis, hours of despair. Though the darkness of the tunnel is initially eerie, you soon find your way, certainly if not easily. And the light at the end of it may blind you for a while but you soon adapt to it as well. 

After all  what are the adaptators called sunglasses for!! 

Picture Courtesy:

1. http://www.norsonic.dk/index.php?sideID=2227&ledd2=1044&ledd1=104 
2. http://swittersb.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/the-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-fetch/