As I was working on the image, I was reminded of a comment one of our friends made at dinner the other evening.
"Hey, you're the big clock expert," she began somewhat ominously. "How come clocks with Roman numerals always use 'IIII' instead of 'IV'?"
I prefaced my answer by saying that I'd never really given it any thought and then admitted that I didn't know the answer—though I suspected it had to do with aesthetics and balance. One look at my little collage above should be enough to convince anyone that my grasp of compositional balance is tenuous at best, but there you have it.
Since then, I took 15 seconds out of my busy schedule to Google for the answer and was surprised that this is a topic of some lukewarm debate. If you're interested in how that all shakes out, Cecil Adams, in his typically entertaining fashion, covers it pretty well in this article.
Now playing: Inspiral Carpets, Revenge Of The Goldfish
3 comments:
Could be, but I thought those were supposed to be strips of some kind of fabric.
How in the world did you gain the title of "clock expert?"
Tink: by having about half a dozen of the old winders around the house and knowing just slightly more about them than the person I'm talking to.
That said, I have had a couple of them apart and put them back together again, several times. And they still run at least as well as before they went all to pieces.
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