The underdog so often loses out, doesn’t it? Poor
underdog. Take the midstairs for example. That’s right, midstairs. We keep
referring to the upstairs or downstairs in everyday discourse when informing
others of where we might be going or what we’re doing. Such as, “I’m going
upstairs to bed, see you in the morning”. Or (speaking to your wife), “I just accidently
pushed your mother downstairs. Unfortunately she doesn’t seem to breathing.”
Upstairs and downstairs are helpful,
practical adverbial expressions in the usual sense (they can also function as a
noun or adjective – but that’s a story for another day). That’s all very well. But
what about poor old midstairs? It never – or hardly – gets a look in, does it?
It should. Why not? Well, think about it. I mean if there was no midstairs no
one would be able to get upstairs or go downstairs in the first place. You wouldn’t
be getting the sleep you needed because you couldn’t reach your bed – at least
for those of us with our bedroom all the way upstairs. And, possibly, you’d not
have finally gotten rid of your mother-in-law, obtaining all the joy of
watching her free-fall tumbling to a thumping death at the bottom of the
stairwell in the process.
So, sorry, there’s just no escaping it. You
have to necessarily traverse midstairs to reach either downstairs or upstairs.
The midstairs is the crucial bit joining the two opposite ends together, a
seamless bridge that you don’t even notice or normally give a second thought to.
Without it you’d be stranded down the bottom or up the top with no way to reach
the other side. Doomed with no foreseeable way to get back. Like the Star Trek
gang on some weird where-the-hell-are-we-and-how-did-we-get-stranded-here? episode.
Come to think of it, without midstairs we could never really have an upstairs
or downstairs in the first place. Then what would we all do? Keep travelling
and going places and meeting only on the horizontal plane? Relocating our
bedrooms downstairs? Disposing of our mother-in-laws only by non-vertical means?
Just think of the implications and how limiting and inconvenient this would be.
The midstairs. I wholly embrace it. I’m
rooting for its linguistic relevance and subsequent usage. See you midstairs
sometime as you make your merry way either upstairs or downstairs.
