Precious morning

It's odd what the brain will do sometimes.

I ride Metro to work since we changed offices back in June. Outside the station where I get off is a man handing out the free Metro newspaper - well, there's somebody outside all the stations, but it's this one man I want to talk about.

Every weekday since July, barring snow days and vacation, I have walked past this man and heard him hawking (can you hawk something that's free? maybe he's just alerting us to its availability) the paper. And I have almost never been clear on what he was actually saying.

His call has two parts, and one of them seemed quite clear: "Precious precious precious precious!" he would call, and follow that with something else that ended in "morning". For a while I thought it was "precious morning", but that never sounded quite right. Six months I listened to him, and six months I wasn't quite sure he was saying "precious morning, precious precious precious precious!"

Mind, I don't care if he is saying "precious morning" - my first thought had, in fact, been that it was "blessed morning", but all the Metro folks that say "have a blessed day/evening" pronounce "blessed" as one syllable. "Precious morning" is an unobjectionable, even uplifting thing to hear in the early dawn (or pre-dawn) as you head off to work, a reminder that the day is, in fact, precious and a call to celebrate it instead of complain.

My problem was that it just didn't sound like "precious morning" - there were too many syllables; though the initial P was clear, I felt that the repeated "precious" that accompanied it inclined me to hear it.

Then about a month ago I suddenly realized - and I mean suddenly, in the middle of his call - that he was saying "Paper of the morning, precious precious precious precious!"

Wow. "Paper of the morning" makes much more sense, but then what was the "precious" doing after it? It's not a bad little tabloid-style newspaper - the Washington Post puts it out - but it's hardly precious.

And then yesterday as I came out of the station I understood him as clearly as if I had never misunderstood.

"Paper of the morning," he calls, "Express, Express, Express, Express."

I could have told you the thing was called the Metro Express - but then you'd have known instantly. What I can't figure out is why I didn't.

Like I said, it's odd.