The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content.
I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Museum patrons all around me were looking up from their phones to admire David as well. Despite it being legacy content,
David was so scrollstoppingly captivating that it generated stronger engagement than TikTok and Instagram combined, despite those platforms offering fresher, more
personally relevant content.
My awe only grew when I noticed the museum gift shop converting 60% of its traffic, numbers that would make any content creator salivate.
…
In case it wasn’t obvious that Michael was being facetious (oh god, please let it be obvious), he says as much right after this introduction.
The point is: ‘content‘ have become a catch-all term so broad as to be meaningless. A tweet is content. A Netflix series is content. Everything in-between
that is passively or mostly-passsively consumed is content, whether it’s AI-slop music or template-driven memes. And content exists to
trigger engagement and drive traffic and oh shit now we’re down a rabbithole of meaningless SEO jargon.
Like Michael, I don’t like it. These different media are fundamentally different, and we should embrace that. A blogger is not (necessarily) a documentarian, nor are they
a comic book artist or an exhibition curator or a podcaster. They can be all of those things, but they’re different things! When we treat them all as interchangeable kinds
of “content” for a generic “audience”, we lose something about what’s beautiful and unique about each of them… and we lose the opportunity to find and name new art forms at the
intersections between them.
You can call things “content” if you like, but the vocabulary available to us is richer than that, and the things we create – in whatever form they take – can be too, when we use it.
When it first appeared, Google Search was a breath of fresh air. Simple, powerful search that Just Worked. It’s little wonder that the phase “to Google” something became synonymous with
“to search for” something.
Somewhere, Google lost its way.1
Perhaps the latest example of that is the injection of AI into every search2:
I’ve been to the cinema a few times lately so I’ve seen the Google AI ad that inspired me to make this parody… a lot.
Music by Dead Tubes Foundation (click to unmute/mute).
Apparently the kids these days don’t “Google it”. At least, not in their colloquialisms: they’re still probably using the search engine.
We should turn the verb use of googling into an insult.
Example: “That’s so unbelievable it sounds like you googled it.”
I love this, and I’m absolutely going to start using it. “To Google” can absolutely transform from meaning “to search for, using a Web search engine” to meaning:
to seek knowledge in a lazy and convenient way, without regard for its accuracy
(“I Googled from a guy at the pub that 5G caused Covid”)
to acquire information that can’t accurately be sourced or verified
(“don’t quote me on that, though: I Googled it”)
to prefer an answer to a question that’s mildly more-convenient for the asker, even if getting it was ethically problematic
(“pass me the jump leads, I’m going to Google one of the hostages”)
DeGoogling is so… 2010s. Let’s make the 2020s the decade where we redefine Google as a verb, in a way that better represents what it means to continue to buy in to the
ever-increasingly toxic Google Search ecosystem.
2 Yes, I’m aware that some other search engines include AI summaries in results, too. But
they all seem easier to turn off… and I’m yet to see a cinema advertisement about the fact that they do it for anything other that Google Search.
Rubberdogging, verb: attempting to invent a solution to a technical problem by explaining it out loud to a pet. From “rubberducking”, the practice of doing so
to an inanimate object, and “dog walking”.
A man takes a train from London to the coast. He’s visiting a town called Wulfleet. It’s small and old, the kind of place with a pub that’s been pouring pints since the Battle of
Bosworth Field. He’s going to write about it for his blog. He’s excited.
He arrives, he checks in. He walks to the cute B&B he’d picked out online. And he writes it all up like any good travel blogger would: in that breezy LiveJournal style from 25
years ago, perhaps, in his case, trying a little too hard.
But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words,
and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.
By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.
But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.
None of the story is real: not the blogger, not the town. But the languageisreal, or at least realistic. I constructed the passages myself, working
from what we know about how English was written in each period.
…
It’s possible you caught this excellent blog post last month, but if you didn’t, you’re in for a treat. A long rambling “travel blog” story, except that every three or four paragraphs
the author’s transported back a hundred years in time, which adapts not only the story but – more-importantly – the language the author uses.
For the last couple of hundred years the English language has been moderately stable and well-defined, although the stylistic mannerisms of authors have changed. But as you read beyond
that, the language feels like it’s slowly mutating into something that, by the time you get to a thousand years ago, is nearly indecipherable!
Don’t just read the demonstration until you find you can’t understand it any more, though! After all of that, keep scrolling, and you’ll find that Colin Gorrie’s put together an explanation of what you just read. It describes the linguistic
shifts you’ve now just experienced first-hand, the reasons for them, and how they were reconstructed in order to make this amusing distraction.
The footnotes are great too.
Also; it’s well worth watching/listening to the video that inspired it, in which you can hear (twice, the second time with
explanatory slides) a linguist read a monologue that starts in the English of around 1,500 years ago and progress, jumping every few sentences, through to modern English. Absolutely
fascinating.
Can it perhaps be time that we stop saying “ethical non-monogamy”?
Nobody feels the need to say “ethical monogamy”; monogamous folks are given the benefit of the doubt and assumed to be practicing a relationship ethically.
I feel like polyamory, open relationships, relationship anarchy and other forms of non-monogamy are now sufficiently accessible to popular culture that we can drop the word “ethical”
and still be understood. (Ideally we do so before it starts to look like virtue-labelling.)
The elder of our two cars is starting to exhibit a few minor, but annoying, technical faults. Like: sometimes the Bluetooth connection to your phone will break and instead of music, you
just get a non-stop high-pitched screaming sound which you can suppress by turning off the entertainment system… but can’t fix without completely rebooting the entire car.
There’ve been other “this car is getting a bit older” technical faults too. One of his tyre pressure sensors broke the other month and caused a cascade of unrelated errors that
disabled the traction control, ABS, auto-handbrake, parking sensors, and reversing camera… but replacing the pressure sensor fixed everything. Cars are weird, and that’s coming from
somebody working in an industry that fully embraces knock-on regression bugs as a fact of life.
The “wouldn’t you rather listen to screaming” problem occurred this morning. At the time, I was driving the kids to an activity camp, and because they’d been quite enjoying singing
along to a bangin’ playlist I’d set up, they pivoted into their next-most-favourite car journey activity of trying to snipe at one another1.
So I needed a distraction. I asked:
We’ve talked about homonyms and homophones before, haven’t we? I wonder: can anybody think of a pair of words that are homonyms that are nothomophones? So: two words that are spelled the same, but mean different things and sound different when you say
them?
This was sufficiently distracting that it not only kept the kids from fighting for the entire remainder of the journey, but it also distracted me enough that
I missed the penultimate turning of our journey and had to double-back2
…in English
With a little prompting and hints, each of the kids came up with one pair each, both of which exploit the pronunciation ambiguity of English’s “ea” phoneme:
Lead, as in:
/lɛd/ The pipes are made of lead.
/liːd/ Take the dog by her lead.
Read, as in:
/ɹɛd/ I read a great book last month.
/ɹiːd/ I will read it after you finish.
These are heterophonic homonyms: words that sound different and mean different things, but are spelled the same way. The kids and I only came up with the two on our car
journey, but I found many more later in the day. Especially, as you might see from the phonetic patterns in this list, once I started thinking about which other sounds are ambiguous
when written:
Tear (/tɛr/ | /tɪr/): she tears off some paper to wipe her tears away.
Wind(/waɪnd/ |/wɪnd/): don’t forget to wind your watch before you wind your horn.
Live (/laɪv/ | /lɪv/): I’d like to see that band live if only I could live near where they play.
Bass (/beɪs/ | /bæs/): I play my bass for the bass in the lake.
Bow (/baʊ/ | /boʊ/): take a bow before you notch an arrow into your bow.
Sow (/saʊ/ | /soʊ/): the pig and sow ate the seeds as fast as I could sow them.
Does (/dʌz/ | /doʊz/): does she know about the bucks and does in the forest?
(If you’ve got more of these, I’d love to hear read them!)
…in other Languages?
I’m interested in whether heterophonic homonyms are common in any other languages than English? English has a profound advantage for this kind of wordplay3, because it has weakly phonetics (its orthography is irregular: things
aren’t often spelled like they’re said) and because it has diverse linguistic roots (bits of Latin, bits of Greek, some Romance languages, some Germanic languages, and a smattering of
Celtic and Nordic languages).
With a little exploration I was able to find only two examples in other languages, but I’d love to find more if you know of any. Here are the two I know of already:
In French I found couvent, which works only thanks to a very old-fashioned word:
/ku.vɑ̃/ means convent, as in – where you keep your nuns, and
/ku.və/ means sit on, but specifically in the manner that a bird does on its egg, although apparently this usage is considered archaic and the word
couver is now preferred.
In Portugese I cound pelo, which works only because modern dialects of Portugese have simplified or removed the diacritics that used to differentiate the
spellings of some words:
/ˈpe.lu/ means hair, like that which grows on your head, and
/ˈpɛ.lu/ means to peel, as you would with an orange.
If you speak more or different languages than me and can find others for me to add to my collection of words that are spelled the same but that are pronounced differently,
I’d love to hear them.
Special Bonus Internet Points for anybody who can find such a word that can reasonably be translated into another language as a word which also exhibits the same
phenomenon. A pun that can only be fully understood and enjoyed by bilingual speakers would be an especially exciting thing to behold!
Footnotes
1 I guess close siblings are just gonna go through phases where they fight a lot, right?
But if you’d like to reassure me that for most it’s just a phase and it’ll pass, that’d be nice.
2 In my defence, I was navigating from memory because my satnav was on my phone and it was
still trying to talk over Bluetooth to the car… which was turning all of its directions into a high-pitched scream.
3 If by “advantage” you mean “is incredibly difficult for non-native speakers to ever
learn fluently”.
As part of our trip to the two-island republic of Trinidad & Tobago, Ruth and I decided we’d love to take a
trip out to Buccoo Reef, off the coast of the smaller island. The place we’ve been staying
during the Tobago leg of our visit made a couple of phone calls for us and suggested that we head on down to the boardwalk at nearby Buccoo the next morning where we’d apparently be
able to meet somebody from Pops Tours who’d be able to take us out1.
I could have shown you a picture of the fun ‘I ♥️ Buccoo’ sign from the boardwalk, but I got distracted by a Magnificent Frigatebird circling overhead2.
At the allotted time, we found somebody from Pops Tours, who said that he was still waiting for their captain to get there3
and asked us to go sit under the almond tree down the other end of the boardwalk and he’d meet us there.
It was only after we left to follow the instructions that I remembered that I don’t know how to identify an almond tree. So we opted to sit under a tree near a chicken teaching her
chicks how to eat a coconut4. I still don’t know if that was right, but the boaters found us in the
end so it can’t have been too far off.
We’d previously clocked that one of the many small boats moored in the bay was Cariad, and found ourselves intensely curious. All of the other
boats we’d seen had English-language names of the kinds you’d expect: a well-equipped pleasure craft optimistically named Fish Finder, a small dual-motorcraft with the moniker
Bounty, a brightly-coloured party boat named Cool Runnings, and so on. To travel a third of the way around the world to find a boat named in a familiar Welsh word felt
strange.
Either you’re an extremely long way from home, boat, or else somebody around here has a surprising interest in the Welsh language.
So imagine our delight when the fella we’d been chatting to came over, explained that their regular tour boat (presumably the one pictured on their website) was in the shop, and said
that his cousin would be taking us out in his boat instead… and that cousin came over piloting… the Cariad!
As we climbed aboard, we spotted that he was wearing a t-shirt with a Welsh dragon on it, and a sticker on the side of the helm carried a Welsh flag. What strange coincidence is this,
that Ruth and I – who met while living in Wales and come for a romantic getaway to the Caribbean – should happen to find ourselves aboard a literal “love” boat named in Welsh.
Long shallow sandbars and reefs almost surround the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, leaving enormous areas accessible only to low-draft boats (and helping to protect the islands from
some of the worst of the weather that the Caribbean can muster).
There probably aren’t many boats on Earth that fly both the colours of Trinidad & Tobago and of Wales, so we naturally had to ask: did you name this boat?, and why? It
turns out that yes, our guide for the day has a love of and fascination with Wales that we never quite got to the bottom of. He’d taken a holiday to Swansea just last year, and would be
returning to Wales again later this year.
It’s strange to think that anybody might deliberately take a holiday from a tropical island paradise to come to drizzly cold Wales, but there you have it. It sounds like he was
into his football and that might have had an impact on his choice of destination, but choose to believe that maybe there’s a certain affinity between parts of the world that have
experienced historical oppression at the hands of a colonial English mindset? Like: perhaps Nigerians would enjoy India as a getaway destination, or Guyanans would dig Mauritius as a
holiday spot, too?5
I wrote previously about visiting the Nylon Pool, an waist-deep bit of ocean on a sandbar a full half a mile offshore.
We took a dip at the Nylon Pool, snorkelled around parts of Buccoo Reef (replete with tropical fish of infinite variety and colour), spotted sea turtles zipping around the boat, and
took a walk along No Man’s Land (a curious peninsula, long and thin and cut-off from the mainland by mangrove swamps, so-named
because Trinidadian law prohibits claiming ownership of any land within a certain distance of the high tide mark… and this particular beach spot consists entirely of such land,
coast-to-coast, on account of its extreme narrowness. All in all, it was a delightful boating adventure.
(And for the benefit of the prospective tourist who stumbles upon this blog post in years to come, having somehow hit the right combination of keywords: we paid $400 TTD6
for the pair of us: that’s about £48 GBP at today’s exchange rate, which felt like exceptional value for an amazing experience given that we got the expedition entirely to ourselves.)
Any worries I might have had about the seaworthiness of our vessel as its owner repeatedly bailed out the back of the boat with a small bucket were quickly assuaged when I realised
that I could probably walk most of the way back to shore, should I need to! (sadly not visible: the Welsh dragon on front of his t-shirt)
But aside from the fantastic voyage we got to go on, this expedition was noteworthy in particular for Cariad and her cymruphile captain. It feels like a special kind of
small-world serendipity to discover such immediate and significant common ground with a stranger on the other side of an ocean… to coincide upon a shared interest in a culture and place
less-foreign to you than to your host.
An enormous diolch yn fawr7 is due to Pops Tours for this remarkable experience.
Footnotes
1 Can I take a moment to observe how much easier it was to charter a boat in Tobago than
it was in Ireland, where I left several answerphone messages but never even got a response? Although in the Irish boat
owners’ defence, I was being creepy and mysterious by asking them to take me to random coordinates off the coast.
2 It’s possible that I’ve become slightly obsessed with frigatebirds since arriving here.
I first spotted them from our ferry ride from Trinidad to Tobago, noticing their unusually widely-forked tails, striking white (in the case of the
females) chests, and relatively-effortless (for a seabird) thermal-chasing flight. But they’re really cool! They’re a seabird… that isn’t waterproof and can’t swim… if they land in
the water, they’re at serious risk of drowning! (Their lack of water-resistant feathers helps with their agility, most-likely.) Anyway – while they can snatch
shallow-swimming prey out of the water, they seem to prefer to (and get at least 40% of their food from) stealing it from other birds, harassing them in-flight and snatching it from
their bills, or else attacking them until they throw up and grabbing their victim’s vomit as it falls. Nature is weird and amazing.
3 Time works differently here. If you schedule something, it’s more a guideline than it is
a timetable. When Ruth and I would try paddleboarding a few days later we turned up at the rental shack at their published opening time and hung out on the beach for most of an hour
before messaging the owners via the number on their sign. After 15 minutes we got a response that said they’d be there in 10 minutes. They got there 20 minutes later and opened their
shop. I’m not complaining – the beach was lovely and just lounging around in the warm sea air with a cold drink from a nearby bar was great – but I learned from the experience that if
you’re planning to meet somebody at a particular time here, you might consider bringing a book. (Last-minute postscript: while trying to arrange our next accommodation, alongside
writing this post, I was told that I’d receive a phone call “in half an hour” to arrange payment: that was over an hour ago…)
4 Come for the story of small-world serendipity; stay for the copious candid bird photos,
I guess?
6 Exceptionally-geeky footnote time. The correct currency symbol for the Trinidad & Tobago
Dollar is an S-shape with two vertical bars through it, which is not quite the same as the conventional S-shape with a single vertical bar that you’re probably used to seeing
when referring to e.g. American, Canadian, or Australian dollars. Because I’m a sucker for typographical correctness, I decided that I’d try to type it “the right way” here in my blog
post, and figured that Unicode had solved this problem for me: the single-bar dollar sign that’s easy to type on your keyboard inherits its codepoint from ASCII, I guessed, so the
double-bar dollar sign would be elsewhere in Unicode-space, right? Like how Unicode defines single-bar (pound) and double-bar (lira) variants of the “pound sign”. But it turns out this isn’t the case: the double-bar dollar sign, sometimes called
cifrão (from Portugese), and the single-bar dollar sign are treated as allographs: they
share the same codepoint and only the choice of type face differentiates between them. I can’t type a double-bar dollar sign for you without forcing an additional font upon
you, and even if I did it wouldn’t render “correctly” for everybody. Unicode is great, but it’s not perfect.
7 “Thank you very much”, in Welsh, but you probably knew that already.
Kids’ ability to pick up new words from context is amazing.
Kids’ confidence even when they’ve misunderstood how a word is used is hilarious. 😊
This evening, our 7-year-old was boasting about how well-behaved his class was while their regular teacher had to attend an all-day meeting, vs how much it impressed the temporary
teacher they had.
His words: “Today we had a supply teacher and we totally DOMINATED her!”
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