Way back in the mists of time, my chum Jay Dowling introduced me to DUST, which is an interesting science-fiction brand that presents thought-provoking visions of the future. The way he did this was to point me at the Future Boyfriend video on YouTube.
I’ve been meaning to share this with you for yonks, but now I fear we must first explain the concept of a yonk. Actually, that may prove to be a tad difficult, because the noun yonks comes in its plural form only — one never talks about a single yonk lest one be considered to be a drongo.
Yonks can be taken to mean “a long time,” “a very long time,” or “a much longer time than expected.” I’ve heard different origin stories for this term. One suggestion is that it’s an acronym of “Years, mONths, weeKS.” But the one I like best is that it’s an abbreviated version of a spoonerism: we start with “donkey’s years,” which is spoonerized to “yonkey’s dears,” which is abbreviated to “yonkeys” and then to “yonks.”
But we digress… If you visit the DUST Channel on YouTube, you will be presented with a cornucopia of incredibly good science fiction shorts that don’t just revel in special effects, but actually have plots and good acting as well. Suffice it to say that, once you’ve fallen into this rabbit hole, you won’t emerge for yonks.
Let me stay with your digression. Southern African speak has a short term equivalent. “Just now” means anything from2 minutes to an hour. “Now, now” is vaguely more urgent.
It confuses so much that almost everyone I know that has encountered it will periodically bring it up in conversation.
It’s funny how different groups of people have different expressions for things like this. I’d love to know where these thinks came from, like “donkey’s years” as in “I haven’t seen him for donkey’s years” (meaning a long time) or “in a tick” as in “I’ll do it in a tick” (meaning very soon or very quickly).
Reminds me of a childhood playground “thing” (I don;t quite know what else to call it),
You would walk up to someone and say (I was normally the recipient) the following accompanied by some vigorous actions
“Hello Jack, how’s your back” (heavy pat on back)
“It’s been donkey’s ears” (tweak ear)
“But I still nose you” (tweak nose)
I bet that never got old LOL
When you come to think about it, time is a funny old thing (see “Is Time Truly an Illusion?” https://www.clivemaxfield.com/is-time-truly-an-illusion/). In English, for example, we make use of three tenses to indicate when the situation in question takes place in time: the past (“before now”), the present (“now”), and the future (“after now”).
If you are brought up with this, you assume it’s the only way to do things, but some languages employ only two tenses to express past and non-past, where non-past covers both present and future. By comparison, other two-tense languages express only future and non-future. Some languages don’t have any tenses at all (I find it hard to wrap my brain around this), while some use four or more tenses to express finer temporal distinctions. The Aboriginal Australian six-tense language Kalaw Lagaw Ya, for example, distinguishes between the “remote past,” the “recent past,” the “today past,” the “present,” the “today/near future” and the “remote future.”
Thanks for sharing!