Saturday, April 19, 2014

Explaining the Whole Dink Thing


The short version?  So long as the brand name 'Dink' is acceptable, can be used with a straight face, then we have not all been blended into one homogeneous whole.

The long:

I found a whole new variety of Dink, the Super Dink. Don't believe me? Photos HERE.

If you haven't read the last and every other Italian travel postcard, the fact that there is a Korean scooter called a Dink is evidence that colloqial English is not yet ubiquitous; therefore globalization is not yet utterly hegemonic. So, each trip to Europe, I measure the progress of capitalist globalization by way of a count of the number of Dinks of various models that I can find.

Their proportion of the entire scooter population has been declining over the past 15 years.  It has been a while since I was able to find a Dink 50, let alone a Dink 150 or a Grand Dink (known to the cognicenti as the 'Big Dink').

Today however, I came across a whole new kind of Dink: a Super Dink.

We can but hope that this signals a whole new resurgence of Dinkdom, and of popular resistance to globalization.

The sighting of a few People's 50s is also potentially heartening, but we'll have to see.  The moniker is being used in China to cover and excuse a multitude of sins.  But, even at it's best, not the barometer that the Dink has been and hopefully will be.

UPDATE October 2017:  One Dink to be seen in 6 weeks in southern France, Hungary and Germany.

No comments:

Post a Comment