There comes a time in the lives of all men and women when we first hear the expression ‘in sync’ and our thoughts naturally fly to the washing up. Ah, the naivety of youth.
I still remember my first time. I had rushed out and bought A Tonic For The Troops, the new album from the Boomtown Rats (this was back in that narrow strip of history when people rushed out and bought albums by the Boomtown Rats) and I had settled in with my biscuit tins, Tupperware cake box and wooden spoons to listen to it five times through and drum along until I’d learnt it beat for beat and word for word.
What do you mean, ‘weirdo’?
Anyway, one of the big hits off the album (hands up if you remember this) was Like Clockwork, which contained the line ‘And we think in sync like clockwork’.
I can laugh about it now but when you don’t know that ‘sync’ is a word but do know that ‘sink’ is a word, it’s all very disconcerting. ‘Think in sink’? Why would you get in a sink to think? Even if you are Bob Geldof? My daughter used to get in the sink but she was two years old. We’d just throw in the dishes and she’d have it all done in a couple of minutes. Teach em young, that’s what I say.
But I digress. At the same time that the Rats were recording A Tonic For The Troops, a bloke called Chris Kelly was presenting a programme on ITV called Clapperboard. Remember it? Clapperboard was a half hour film review programme for kids and it began with one of those iconic hinged slates that they use to start the shooting of a film scene.
OK, so I understood that this was called a clapperboard because it made a loud ‘clap’ sound, but what was the point of it, I wondered? A little investigation told me that it was all about the sync. The loud clap makes it easy for the film editor to line up the audio and video on the editing machine so that sound and image are in sync and not looking like a scene from The Water Margin.
Clever.
Interestingly, the abbreviation of synchronisation (try saying that with a mouthful of crackers) is as old as the film industry itself, although back in the 1920s they preferred the spelling ‘synch’. This, however, became confused with the word ‘cinch’, which they needed for Broadway musicals, so they dropped the ‘h’ during the war – a good time to bury bad consonants. And drop Hs.
Thus I learnt what ‘sync’ means and I was able to sing along to Like Clockwork without even thinking about the washing up… that is until my mum told me to ‘stop denting my biscuit tins’ and come and do the washing up.
