www fool com — three letters, three bells

www fool com reads, on the page, like the address of a small castle. three letters, three bells, a domain. mom mentions an ad she saw on tv. mike pretends to listen. hank, fictional dog of 1B, agrees from the hallway. the castle gate, allegedly, is open.

9:14am, a friday. the training session pulled carla up to the third floor. i have, by my count, the rest the morning of before anyone notices i’m not in any spreadsheet. let’s open the gate.

so. www fool com. on inspection, that string is six characters of address with a noble word stuck in the middle of it. dot fool dot com. it is, technically, a url. it is also, in my reading, a kind of ceremonial. you don’t type those characters by accident. nobody fat-fingers fool. you arrive there on purpose. you arrive there because somebody, at some point, said the word out loud and it stuck.

www fool com: a web address operated by the financial-media company informally known as the motley fool. it serves as the company’s main public-facing website, hosting articles, stock-pick research, podcast pages, newsletter signups, and the various subscription products the company sells. the prefix www is, on the modern internet, mostly decorative. the domain fool.com is the part doing the work.

A URL. WITH. THE WORD. FOOL. IN IT.

that, in a sentence, is the part i can’t get past. there are, on the modern internet, thousands of financial websites. most of them are named things like capitalstrategiesgroup.com or marketinsightsinternational.com. names that telegraph competence. names that say do not laugh, this is serious money. and then there is a website with a name i have never quite gotten used to, sitting there, with the word fool in plain script on the homepage. that is, by every standard available to me, an act of branding courage.

three letters, three bells, the structure of the address

let me, before i lose the thread, look at the actual address. www fool com. read out loud, it has three beats. dub-dub-dub. fool. com. three bells. three beats. that is, structurally, the rhythm of a small ceremonial — the kind of thing a town crier might announce on the steps of a small castle. “hear ye, hear ye, dub-dub-dub fool com is open for business.” i’m aware that nobody says it that way. but the rhythm is there, on the page, whether anybody hears it or not.

the prefix www, by the way, is on the modern internet a polite anachronism. most browsers don’t need it. most addresses don’t display it. but the company, on inspection, kept it. they kept the three w’s. they kept the rhythm. they kept the bells. that is, on my reading, an aesthetic choice. they could have collapsed it into fool.com and called it modern. they did not. the bells stayed. the ceremonial stayed. the gate, in this small way, stayed open in the older form.

mom called me about an ad, by the way

mom called on sunday, as mom does. she had been watching some kind of cable program on a tuesday — i don’t follow her viewing schedule, mom contains seasons — and an ad came on. the ad mentioned fool dot com. mom did not understand why a financial company would use the word “fool” in its own name. mom asked me, calmly, in the voice mom uses when she is about to teach me something she has no intention of admitting she is teaching me, “is this the same place that’s been on tv for thirty years?”

i said yes. mom said, after a pause, “hm. clever.”

that’s mom. that’s the mom analysis. that’s, frankly, the whole brief on the marketing strategy of the company in two syllables. clever. mom does not say “clever” lightly. mom calls most things “fine” or “we’ll see”. for mom to deploy “clever” requires a website to have done something genuinely unusual. using the word fool, in plain script, on the homepage of a finance company, is unusual enough to earn a clever from mom. i am, on a friday, prepared to accept that ruling.

the castle metaphor, if you’ll let me

let me extend the small-castle thing because it amuses me and the training session won’t end for another forty minutes.

so the address www fool com is, on this read, the address of a small castle that has, structurally, put the fool right on the gate. before you walk in, the gate tells you what to expect. the gate says fool. you cannot complain later that you didn’t know. that is, in the legal sense, full disclosure. that is, in the etymological sense, the noble fool tradition i have written about elsewhere, applied to web design.

credit cards are a personality trait, but websites are also a personality trait

i hold HT26 on a daily basis. credit cards are a personality trait. some men carry the platinum and lean on it. some men carry the metal one. some men carry, like me, the one with a tiny scratch from a pocket-knife incident in 2021. the card you choose says something. the platinum says i make decisions on planes. the metal says i make decisions in restaurants. the scratched plastic one says, on inspection, that i have given up on first impressions and trust the second one to be more forgiving.

websites are also a personality trait. websites are a card you carry. www fool com, as a card, says i’m not going to pretend i’m wall street. the address itself is a personality. the address itself is, on inspection, a soft punchline you walk into. the company has been, by this read, telling the same joke for thirty years. some jokes have, by repetition, become small institutions. that joke, with three w’s and a com, is one of them.

mike, briefly, on the topic at the bar

i mentioned the address to mike at the corner. i said, “fool dot com.” mike said, without looking up from his beer, “yeah.” i said, “what do you think of the name?” mike said, “honest.” i said, “that’s it?” mike said, “yeah.”

that’s mike. mike’s reviews are short. mike’s reviews are also, by long observation, accurate. mike has reviewed approximately eleven websites in my hearing over the past four years. he has used three words: “honest”, “trash”, and, once, in 2023, “fine”. he gave fool dot com “honest”. that is, on the mike scale, the highest possible rating short of “fine”.

hank, the dog from 1B, was, technically, not present at the bar. hank does not go to the bar. hank is, on most days, asleep in 1B while the lady from 1B travels too much. but i picture hank agreeing from the hallway. hank, on most matters, agrees from the hallway. that is hank’s contribution. hank is consistent. that is, in the inventory of my life, the second-most-stable thing.

verdict from a man at a desk who types urls by hand

i still type urls by hand sometimes. it is a habit. it is the habit of a man who has, on at least three occasions, been served a phishing site by a search engine and learned, the slow way, to type the address himself. when i type fool dot com, i feel the bells. dub-dub-dub. f-o-o-l. dot. c-o-m. it has, on the keyboard, the rhythm of a small ceremonial. that is, on a friday, the small pleasure i wanted to record.

so the address itself, separate from the company, separate from the brand, separate from the products, is — by my reading — already a small piece of writing. three w’s, a noble word, a com. a gate, a sign, a domain. mom called it clever. mike called it honest. hank, from the hallway, agreed. that is, on most days, my full focus group. that is, on most days, enough.

carla just walked past the desk. i minimized this. she didn’t say anything that’s a good usually sign or a bad one. one of the two.

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