Under TENSion

For about the last week, my shoulder has been slowly seizing up again: every morning a little tighter, a little more painful, a little less responsive to drugs.

Which being true, possibly it was not the brightest idea in the world to spend last night sitting out without a jacket in the rain, watching a not-very-good Romeo and Juliet.

This morning, the shoulder has been ... bad.

So it's back on the TENS machine for me, hey-ho. Tingle-time. And an appointment with my doctor for bigger brighter heavier painkillers. He will look at me askance, and wonder if I'm addicted. Actually not, but, y'know. If he doesn't ask, I can't tell him; volunteering the information is an instant dose of protesting-too-much.

Or I'm hypersensitive. Or both.

(Is there a rule, by the way, for when an acronym can drop its capitalisation and be written out like a regular word, like radar? If so, I am invoking it, prematurely or otherwise: if I mention it again, the TENS will revert to a Tens machine; in the same way that I write about Aids, not AIDS. It may horrify the copy-editors among us, but I can't be doing with these attention-grabbing capitals in the middle of a sentence. In fiction, I drop the capitals on titles, too, whenever I reasonably can: "As you say, captain," rather than "As you say, Captain." Capitals mid-sentence snag the eye, I find, and disrupt the visual flow of the prose. I have to fight for this with every book.)

Vocab again

This one's not a question, more a lament, a thing I want to do and dursen't.

Some years ago, I saw a documentary - about trains, natch - made by John Betjeman 'way back. He was taking dinner in a boarding-house, in his shirtsleeves, gazing around the room at all the other men in jacket & tie; the voiceover said, "I should have worn a coat," and clearly that's what he meant, jacket & tie. I'd never heard it before, that particular code; but I loved it instantly, I've kept it since, and I would like to use it now. We are in that period, amongst that class; certainly my protagonist would be comfortable with that vocabulary.

And I can't use it, because we are seventy years on from there and coat means different things now, certainly doesn't mean the kind of jacket that you put on for a formal dinner. Readers would see an overcoat and be baffled, or else I'd have to find some way to explain and thereby render the whole exercise pointless. Is a shame, but is I think an absolute; it's never about being accurate, it's about being credible, always.

In other news: I am in the Lit & Phil, and I have forgotten my coffee. I am having to drink their coffee. This is ... not optimal. I have Symptoms.