moron definition — and yes the shoe fits

the dictionary said moron, comma, a stupid person. four words. no caveat. no nuance. no asterisk for circumstance. i compared it to my actual operating manual and the overlap was, conservatively, 94%. the missing 6% is just stuff i have not done yet on a tuesday.

3:51pm, on a wednesday. typing this between two emails i won’t open. carla is in the all-hands two floors up, the one with the pie chart that lies. i’ve got, give or take, the rest of the morning. nobody walks by my row before noon.

i’d like to be honest with you, in writing, on company hardware, about a small experiment i ran on myself this week. i opened the dictionary. not the app, the website. the kind of website that does not need an introduction and gets none from me here. i typed in the word. i read the entry. then i read my last seven days. and the entry, comma, fit.

moron definition: in modern english, a moron is a person regarded as foolish or stupid, used informally and mildly insultingly. the entry is short, the entry has no clauses, the entry does not negotiate. four-word definitions are, in this writer’s view, the only kind of definition you can lean on without it bending under your weight.

FOUR. WORDS. THAT’S. THE. ENTIRE. ENTRY.

the four words, repeated, in case you missed them

moron, comma, a stupid person. that’s it. that is the entire load-bearing column of the dictionary entry. there’s some etymology around it for the people who like that sort of thing, and there’s a small note about historical clinical usage in the parenthesis at the bottom, but the working definition, the part you would read on a phone in the elevator if you had a free fourteen seconds, is the four words.

i find this comforting. comforting in the way a small bench in a long hallway is comforting. there is a place to sit. you may sit. the dictionary is not asking me to think harder about whether i belong in the entry. the dictionary is, frankly, opening the door and gesturing.

i sat. i’m sitting now. i’m at the desk, technically, but i’m also, metaphorically, sitting in the entry. a man can occupy two seats simultaneously if he commits to it.

the operating manual, my version, unauthorized

the operating manual is on a sticky note on the side of the standing desk i, as established in the canon of this enterprise, sit at. the manual is short. the manual reads: “be confident, be wrong, be calm about it, eat what’s in the fridge, do not microwave anything with metal, repeat tuesday.” that is, allegedly, the entire document.

this week i compared the document to the longer entry on this word, where i make my full case for the title, and the overlap was, as advertised in the lede, 94%. the missing 6% is two items: i have not yet, this calendar year, microwaved anything with foil; and i have not yet, this month, accepted a calendar invite i sent myself by accident. both of those are still on the table.

the calendar one, in fact, is on this calendar. the calendar is open in tab 31. tab 31 is one of 47 tabs currently running, which is a separate problem and a separate post.

where the definition gets thin, and where i live anyway

the definition does, in fairness, leave some things out. it does not specify how stupid. it does not give a cutoff. it does not tell you whether being a moron is a state you enter on a tuesday and exit by friday, or a permanent residency requiring documentation. it does not, in the four-word version, do nuance. that’s the deal. you take the four words and you do the nuance yourself, or you don’t, and you live with the consequences.

i don’t. i take the four words flat. flat is good for me. flat is what i can carry on a wednesday morning while balancing a coffee that is, technically, my second coffee of the day even though it is the first one i am willing to admit to in print. (coffee is achievement. tea is wet leaves. that’s the canon position.)

the dictionary, by leaving the nuance to me, is showing me a respect i don’t think i’ve earned. it is treating me as a competent reader. it is, you might say, the only institution in my life currently doing so. the bank app has notifications about it. the landlord has opinions about it. the boss, who is in another meeting, has, i suspect, a quiet file about it. only the dictionary thinks i can handle a four-word entry without supervision. i appreciate that.

stefan and the longer definition, which i did not request

stefan, who shows up at the bar approximately every two weeks with a freshly downloaded fact, told me on monday that the dictionary entry “doesn’t capture the full semantic field” of the word. stefan said this with one hand around a beer and the other around a phone showing a wikipedia tab he had read for, by his own admission, “about thirty seconds.”

stefan offered me the longer definition. the longer definition involved several clauses, two parentheticals, and one word i’m fairly sure stefan invented on the spot. the longer definition went on for two minutes. by the end of stefan’s longer definition, i was no longer certain what a moron was. i was, however, certain that i was, increasingly, in the entry.

i wrote down the four-word version on a napkin. i kept the napkin. the napkin is in my back pocket, technically, but i’d say it’s on the standing desk by the end of the day. the napkin survived monday. the longer definition did not.

this is, i think, the entire argument for short definitions. they survive monday. that is an underrated quality.

the dictionary, the manual, the verdict

so here we are, comma, at the verdict. i compared the dictionary entry for the word the title in of this post against my own week, and the entry, in its four-word form, fit. the longer version, as offered by stefan, did not fit, did not survive monday, and did not, on closer inspection, contain a real word. the four-word version, on the other hand, made it through to wednesday with all of its load-bearing clauses intact.

i’m filing the four-word version in the operating manual. the manual now reads: “be confident, be wrong, be calm about it, eat what’s in the fridge, do not microwave anything with metal, a stupid person, repeat tuesday.” the entry has, you’ll notice, gained a phrase. the manual is, accordingly, slightly more accurate than it was on monday.

and there for the is cinephiles the matter of the 1996 film “kingpin”, in which a man named roy munson does, over and over, things that the four-word entry would describe with full accuracy and zero comment. the film does not use the word once. the film does not have to. the four words are doing the work, off-screen, in the audience, the entire ninety-three minutes.