I'll Do It Now in a Minute!

The Welsh have invented a wonderful phrase: "I'll do it now in a minute!"

It may seem contradictory at first, but then when you really think about it...it still is contradictory. However, it makes a certain amount of sense in certain situations.

For instance:

I was eating dinner the other day when Husband asked if I had put the colors into the wash. Oops. I had forgotten. So I said, "I'll do it now," and then immediately realized I was still in the middle of my dinner, so I instantly added, "in a minute." Then I repeated the entire phrase again in a Welsh accent, which caused Husband to laugh out loud for quite a long time.

It's obvious how useful this phrase is when you're being hounded to do something right that instant, but you're just not yet ready to jump to it. Like right now, when I am trying to digest a 22-page white paper on robotics software in order to coherently summarize it in about 500 words (including correct terminology), I stopped at page four in order to jump over here and write in my blog, thus relieving my overheated brain.

Yeah, yeah. I'm getting back to the rest of it. In a minute.

(Closely related is the phrase, "I'll be there now in a minute!")

(I think you get the idea.)