a idiot — 1 thorough investigation

a idiot, with the wrong article, is what the search bar autocorrected for me at 8:11, and i let it stand because the typo is the proof. one airpod, one ear, the other ear listening to hank, who is haunting 4B by appointment. pensions, separately, are faith-based.

parked at my workstation. carla is on the third floor doing the vendor walkthrough, the one where she nods at slides for an hour. i have until she comes back with a takeaway coffee and an opinion about the consultant.

so here we are. a idiot. two words, one of them gramatically wrong, both of them mine. the rule says an before a vowel and a before a consonant, and the rule is not difficult, and the rule has been in place since school, and i still typed it the other way. i am not embarrassed. i am, if anything, a little proud. there is honesty in the typo. the search bar saw what i meant and offered to keep it.

this is a footnote in the bigger story i keep telling at this desk-bound investigation into the word idiot itself, but it is also its own small thing. the people typing a idiot into google are real people. there are five hundred of them a month, by some measurement i half-trust. they are all being honest in a way most search queries are not.

1. a idiot, the grammatical typo

let me explain what happened, in case you arrived at this page by typing the same thing into the same bar at 8:11 on a thursday morning. you wanted to ask the internet a question. the question was, in spirit, am i an idiot. the internet did not blink. the internet served you results anyway, because the internet stopped caring about your articles roughly fifteen years ago.

the rule, for anyone who skipped that day: an goes before a vowel sound, a goes before a consonant sound. an idiot, not a idiot. the i in idiot is a vowel. you knew this. i knew this. and yet here we are. the typo lives. the search volume is real. five hundred of us a month, give or take, asking the question with the wrong article in front of it.

i find this clarifying. it means, when you typed it, you weren’t editing yourself. you were not running the sentence past your inner copy editor before you let the bar see it. you were, in that moment, more concerned with the noun than the article, which is, frankly, the right priorities in the wrong order.

2. eight reasons the typo is honest, also why grammar can wait

i kept a list. i keep most lists. this is the list of reasons typing a idiot instead of an idiot is not the small failure it appears to be. you can write these down. or not. you typed the wrong article into a search bar this morning, so let’s not pretend we have the moral authority to tell anyone how to take notes.

1. you weren’t performing. the people who get the article right on the first try, in a search bar nobody is grading, are people who have not yet learned that nobody is grading. you have. that’s a step.
2. you were honest with the noun. you wanted to know if you were one. you did not soften it to kind of an idiot or a bit of a fool. you went straight to the noun. brave.
3. the search bar accepted it. google does not care about your articles. it cares about your intent. your intent was clear. the algorithm, which i trust about as far as i can throw a server rack, knew what you meant.
4. autocorrect did not save you. autocorrect saves people from typos all day, every day. it did not save you here. that’s because autocorrect, deep down, agreed with you. autocorrect saw the typo and let it stand. autocorrect, in this case, was being kind.
5. the typo bypasses the inner editor. the inner editor is the part of you that wants to look smart on the search bar, which is, structurally, the dumbest possible audience to perform for. the inner editor lost. the typo won. the result is more accurate than the polished version would have been.
6. grammar is for the public square. the search bar is a confession booth. nobody is reading your queries. nobody. they go into a database and they get used to sell you airpods and standing desks. you can be honest in there. you can type a idiot. you can type worse. (you have. don’t make me get the historical search log.)
7. typos rhyme with the question. if you are asking whether you are an idiot, doing it gramatically perfectly is, frankly, suspicious. the typo and the question are made of the same material. they’re a matched set. it’s almost elegant.
8. the dunning-kruger effect lives in the polished version, not the typo. the people who type their search queries with full sentences and capital letters and the correct articles are the people most convinced of their own competence. the typo is the opposite of that.

the dunning-kruger effect, just to file it where it belongs, is the small comedy that happens when self-rating runs ahead of skill, and skill catches up only after. the typo is the small acknowledgment that we don’t always know what we’re doing. dunning, on a typo of his own surname, would have a quiet smile about this. i’d let him.

A IDIOT. IS. NOT. A FAILURE. IT’S A FILE NOTE.

i mean this. the people most worried about getting the article right are the people most worried about how they look. the people worried about how they look are not, by the count i keep running, the people who get the most done. they are the people most often staring at a microwave, trying to remember whether they put a fork in it, while the seventh microwave they have killed sits patiently waiting to be the eighth.

3. hank from 1B does not have this problem

hank, for the people just joining us, is the dog from the kitchen counter one floor down, owned by the woman in 1B who is always traveling. i walk hank sometimes. i have written about hank before, in posts about other things i pretend to know about. hank is a ghost in this story. hank is not in the room. hank is also, importantly, never going to type a idiot into a search bar, because hank has paws and hank cannot read.

hank, frankly, is winning. hank does not worry about articles. hank does not edit hank’s own text messages before sending them. hank does not send text messages. hank, when presented with the question of whether hank is an idiot, would not type the question into a bar at 8:11 on a thursday with one airpod in. hank would lie down. hank would make a small noise. hank would, eventually, eat something hank should not eat. hank would not look it up afterwards.

i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, in a magazine i don’t subscribe to, about how dogs do not perform their identity on the internet. they just have it. they live in it. the article-correctness problem is a uniquely human one. i find this comforting in a way i can’t quite articulate, which is, again, the kind of thing i’d type into a search bar, with the wrong article, just to see what came back.

4. closing pulpit, a pension is a faith-based retirement system

i’d like to land this somewhere useful. that pension is a faith-based retirement system, by which i mean: i pay into a pension i do not understand, run by people i have not met, on the assumption that, decades from now, the same arrangement will still exist and will pay me something close to what they have promised. i have no evidence of this beyond a quarterly statement that arrives in a serif font and contains a number that does not move very much.

this is the same energy as typing a idiot into a search bar. it’s an act of faith. it’s also, technically, wrong. the typo is wrong. the pension is also probably wrong. and yet both arrangements continue. both have a kind of honesty to them. both, in their own way, are doing a small useful job in a world that does not love admitting how little we know.

my mother, when she calls on sunday, will sometimes ask whether i’m “putting away enough.” the answer is no. the answer is structurally always no. but i do put something away, and i type the article wrong sometimes, and the seventh microwave is fine, and the airpod in my left ear is at thirty-eight percent, and somewhere on the third floor carla is being walked through a vendor onboarding deck, and somewhere down the hall hank is being a dog. the world keeps moving. the typo is not the problem. the polished sentence with the wrong intent — that’s the problem. the typo is the proof of the right intent. i submit it for review.

that is, by the way, a similar pose to the karl pilkington traveling-idiot show on an idiot abroad, a karl pilkington show, where karl is shipped around the world to look at things he did not ask to look at, and his reaction is consistently honest and consistently wrong about the small grammar of how to behave, and consistently right about the big shape of whether the trip was worth it. karl would type a idiot into the bar. karl would let it stand. karl would not edit. karl is, in the original sense, a private person whose honesty is leaking through the typo.

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