When I was at school “deck” meant punch. So decking the halls with bows of holy meant punching them with decorations. Beating them into Christmas surrender.
But then, as a child, there was a brief period when we all believed milk was cow urine. This belief spread with a life of its own. One minute, we were happily drinking our milk, the next lactose was untouchable and anyone who drank it was disgusting. “Ugh!” we’d shout and point, “You’re drinking cow wee!”
I think cheese was fine. To be honest, I’m not sure we knew cheese was made from milk. We were five. And we liked cheese. We probably didn’t want to make it playground suicide to eat delicious cheese.
I don’t remember what caused us to re-evaluate our milk beliefs. There wasn’t a moment when we all came together and collectively accepted that milk was not, as James Turner had thoroughly announced across the playground, cow wee. But after a while that belief drifted away. We drank milk again with impunity.
The first half of this, the sudden mass delusion about the origin of milk, feels like it could be a metaphor for conspiracy theories. Flat Earth, Pizzagate, QAnon, pick your poison, is just a grown-up version of our cow wee delusion. One minute, there is nothing, and then, suddenly, everyone thinks it. If you don’t share that belief you are an outcast within your community.
But the second half is where the analogy breaks down. These conspiracies don’t go away on their own after a day or so. Maybe the problem is that you still get to eat cheese when you believe the Earth is flat. If believing in Pizzagate required not eating pizza, perhaps the conspiracy wouldn’t have spread so far.
Maybe there’s a point here about the extra power we have as adults. James Turner wasn’t able to enlist a click farm to produce tens of thousands of cow wee memes and blast them onto the internet. This particular delusion was isolated to one classroom in a tiny rural school in the Fens. The milk industry survived it.
I wonder sometimes about ideas and patterns of thought that survive into adulthood. It was only this year that I realized “deck” in “deck the halls with bows of holy” meant “decorate”. I always assumed “deck” was something archaic. Bedeck, or some such. Shortening “decorate” to “dec” sounds strangely gangster to my ears.
This last thought doesn’t sound like a metaphor for fake news. But a few weeks after I discovered “deck” means “decorate”, I realised it doesn’t. Deck is a word in its own right with a different etymology, from the Dutch dekken meaning to cover (which gives us both “decking” and “all decked out”), whereas decorate comes from the Latin, decoratus meaning to embellish. So “deck” was an archaic construction after all. My childhood assumption was correct. Maybe this is a metaphor too, I don’t know, I think I might be all metaphored out.
As it is January again, it would be remiss of me not to mention a piece I wrote a few years ago about New Year’s Resolutions.
I found this annual ritual surprisingly stressful. What makes a good resolution? It needs to be achievable, but not too ambitious. Specific, but not arbitrary. Significant, but not all-encompassing. Personal, but not shameful. ‘Go to the dentist’ is not ambitious enough. ‘Eat 10 portions of vegetables a day’ is too much. Years later, this feeling came back with a rush of familiarity when filling in my annual appraisal form. We call them SMART objectives now, but they’re essentially a work version of the same thing. Isn’t it enough to do the job well and deal with the unexpected challenges life throws up, without having a quasi-New Year’s resolution as well?
Elsewhere
From a couple of years ago in Buzzfeed by Katie Notopoulos: Why Am I Sp Bad At Typign?
I decide I need to embark on a journey to fix the sins of seventh grade. I will teach myself to type. I will learn at the feet of the masters, champions of speed and accuracy. I will figure out why I made so many typos in the first place. Is it my fingers or my brain? My long nails? Am I just a big dummy? Genetically bad at typing? Is it my computer’s fault or my keyboard’s?
In order to catch a typo, I had to go undercover. I had to become…a typo.
I’ve realised there’s a type of article I’m drawn to: personal histories that explore a concept. Notopoulos’s article frames her own poor typing (I think we’re all poor at typing in a way, aren’t we?) around the wider concept of typing. A fun trip through keyboards, typing competitions, and neurology.
I’ve never been one to only read the latest articles. If something was good in 2021, it should still be good in 2024. So again, from a few years ago, Craig Mod in Wired: The Healing Power of Javascript:
A little over a year ago, as the Covid-19 lockdowns were beginning to fan out across the globe, most folks grasped for toilet paper and canned food. The thing I reached for: a search function.
The purpose of the search function was somewhat irrelevant. I simply needed to code. Code soothes because it can provide control in moments when the world seems to spiral. Reductively, programming consists of little puzzles to be solved. Not just inert jigsaws on living room tables, but puzzles that breathe with an uncanny life force. Puzzles that make things happen, that get things done, that automate tedium or allow for the publishing of words across the world.
It’s only really been in the last few years that I’ve started to see people writing thoughtful pieces about the process of coding. For a long time, I think coding was filed away in a similar place to accounting. People don’t write lyrical essays about balancing their current accounts (Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry doesn’t count). But coding is creative. It is fun and playful and artistic. For me, it sits in the centre of the Venn diagram of maths, writing, and (maybe) sudoku. So I always enjoy reading other people’s personal, philosophical musings on coding.
And if there is a theme to these links this time, it seems to have accidentally become typing: “It can make a person weak in the knees,” Mod writes, “to think about how much of the world's smooth operation is contingent on typing accuracy.”
Albert Burneko in Defector, Get A Load Of This Sorry Piece Of Crap:
The Tesla Cybertruck looks like shit. That is the first thing about it. It looks like somebody should be pulling it out of a men's size-10 loafer in a shoe store in Times Square. It looks like a beard trimmer that plays Phil Collins songs. It looks like it should come free with a Sports Illustrated print subscription in 1987. Maybe it'll look better if you hit ctrl-alt-delete a few times or close WordPerfect in the background. Maybe it's just weird to see it outside of its natural environment, upright on the wall of a public restroom, dispensing paper towels.
Is it becoming blasé to dunk on Elon Musk and the weird Atari-graphics-come-to-live Cybertruck? Maybe, but Burneko does it with such style.
I like electric cars. I don’t like trucks. I like video games. I don’t particularly like real vehicles that look like they come from video games. Its very name, Cybertruck sounds like something the Cybermen would drive. I like Doctor Who, but I dislike using the word “cyber” to mean “online” or “digital”. The whole thing seems designed to exist in a weird liminal space where my likes and dislikes overlap. And Burneko is right. It does look like it comes out of a shoe or is a beard trimmer that plays 80s music.
That’s all for this time,
Simon