| On my way to the Penzance Oxfam shop to do my bit of volunteering each week I often pass the only remaining cinema in Penzance. It is called the Savoy. It opened in 1912 and and is the longest continually running cinema in Britain.
As I was passing the other day, there was a group of young men looking at the posters of the current offerings. One said to the others: “That’s a good one, I think. Shall we watch it tonight?” |
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A few weeks ago, I was on the bus, again going to Oxfam, and I overheard a snippet of conversation between two women. Again they were talking about the cinema and one said to the other: “Oh, I haven’t watched that yet?”
Both of these utterances struck me as distinctly odd. I would have said see instead of watch. I certainly watch a television programme, but I see a film at the cinema, or a play at the theatre. The young men were definitely Cornish, but the woman on the bus came from the West Midlands, judging by her accent. Is the usage of these two words changing?
Both of these utterances struck me as distinctly odd too. In fact I would say totally odd, but thinking it must be a generational thing, I asked my son about them, and he said the bus women were definitely odd, but the poster boys were not entirely odd. So the distinction between watching a film and seeing a film (which I think for both you and me could only mean on television or at the cinema respectively) may not be as functionally robust as I would have thought, but has not yet gone the way of all linguistic flesh.
But think of the statistics of the thing, with the increasing availability of films on demand from BT Vision etc.