imoron — the lowercase version, possibly a brand

imoron. lowercase. as if it were a brand. as if apple had a discount line for those of us who already qualify. i sat with the typo for 14 minutes thinking about the i- prefix as a statement of digital ownership. then i texted mike at the bar. mike did not reply. mike never does on tuesdays.

that is, for the record, the actual sequence. fourteen minutes. one unanswered text. a typo presented to me by a search bar that may or may not have been autocompleting on someone else’s behalf. i looked the word up because i found it in a list of things people apparently look up, which is the kind of nested rabbit hole that ends, on a thursday, with a man at his desk writing 1300 words on a misspelling. i’d like to apologize, in advance, to my employer.

i am, by historical and behavioral measures, a moron in the older clinical sense, with the receipts to prove it. so when a typo lands on my screen with the word “moron” inside it and a stray i bolted onto the front, i pay attention. i should not. but i do. that’s how the morning goes.

desk, monitor, the soft rattle of the building’s ventilation. carla is on the third floor in the all-hands deck rehearsal. i have, by the schedule on the door, until lunch.

imoron, my best guess at what this is

my best guess, after sitting with imoron for the better part of a coffee, is that this is a typo. specifically, i think it is the typo of a person who was trying to type “moron”, possibly into a search bar, possibly while their thumb was on the wrong half of the phone, and the i arrived first by accident. the i sits next to nothing useful on a qwerty keyboard. it sits, on the typical phone keyboard, near the o and the u. i can see how it slipped in. i’ve slipped worse.

but here’s the part that hooked me. the typo did not stay one person’s mistake. it became, by the strange grace of the algorithm, a search query with enough volume that someone, somewhere, decided to track it. that means a number of people, on a number of days, made the same mistake, and the internet, watching, took notes. the typo, in other words, has a following. small. but a following.

i have, over my last seven days, been watched less than the typo imoron. that is a real sentence i am writing on company time, and i stand by it.

the lowercase i and the modern prefix economy

the lowercase i, as a prefix, has done some heavy lifting since approximately 1998. iPhone. iPad. iMac. iBook. iTunes. there was, briefly, an iPod. there is, apparently, an iCloud, which i am told my photos live in, although i have never seen them. the i- prefix, in this context, means roughly: this thing belongs to you, the individual user, the one carrying it around. it is a marketing convention dressed up as grammar.

so when i look at “imoron” on the screen, lowercase i, no space, and i squint, i can almost see a product. the imoron. a sleek device, possibly black, possibly white, that does whatever a moron needs done in the modern digital landscape. checks the snooze. drains the battery. writes a regrettable DM. i would, in a worse mood, buy one.

this is, of course, not what the word means. the word does not mean anything. the word is a typo. but the typo, accidentally, sits inside a tradition. that’s the part i keep turning over. the moron, given a lowercase i, becomes — at least visually — a piece of technology. a product. a personal device. an iMoron with a tap-to-charge case and a battery that lives at 23%, which, in my hands, is just my actual phone.

i do not know what to do with this observation. i’m putting it down anyway.

is imoron a typo or a movement

i’d like to argue, briefly and without conviction, that imoron is more than a typo. that it is, in fact, a small linguistic accident with the structure of a movement. hear me out. or don’t. i’m at a desk and i have most of an hour.

now, this does not mean i think imoron will be in the dictionary in 2030. i don’t. typos, mostly, die. they get autocorrected out of existence. but the fact that the typo has shown up enough to be tracked is, on its face, a tiny event. a footnote in the long story of how words get their hats. and i, at this desk, with the all-hands still going on the third floor, am going to record the footnote.

this is also not the first time i’ve gotten distracted by the difference between a real word and a misread one. i did the same dance with the misreading of oxymoron, which i held for nine years before stefan corrected me. stefan, by the way, would have a field day with imoron. stefan, on his second glass of wine at his cousin’s wedding venue back in september, told a small crowd that “internet typos are the unconscious of the english language”. i wrote it down on a napkin. i still have the napkin. it is, somewhere, in a drawer with three receipts and a key i cannot identify.

me as imoron, registered trademark, in my head

so let me, for the duration of one section, take the typo seriously. let me adopt it. let me, in my head, register the trademark. imoron™. a product. a person. a category of one.

the imoron, as i’m building him, is a moron with a touchscreen. a moron whose mistakes are mostly digital. he hits the 9-minute snooze three times every morning. he carries one half of a pair of airpods; the other lives in a shoe somewhere, possibly his own. he believes, with the conviction of a man who has tested the theory empirically, that coffee is achievement. tea, in his view, is wet leaves. he has not been to the gym since the coupon expired.

the imoron has, in his apartment, a third yoga mat, which he bought with the intention of becoming the kind of person who uses a yoga mat, and which now lives under the couch as an artifact of an earlier and more optimistic version of himself. the imoron has, on his counter, a microwave, which is the seventh he has owned, the previous six having met endings he prefers not to itemize.

the imoron does not file his taxes on time. the imoron does not call his mother on schedule. the imoron does, however, have strong opinions about which days of the week are pulling their weight. he can, on request, deliver a six-minute monologue on why beach vacations are a punishment. he is, in short, me, with a lowercase i stapled to my forehead and a faint smell of new product launch.

i’m picturing the box. matte black. one word in a thin sans-serif. imoron. ships from a warehouse near nowhere. comes with a charging cable that does not fit any of the three cables you already own. the user manual is one page and ends with the sentence good luck.

i would, in this branding exercise, be the spokesman. mike, who runs the bar at the corner, would be the consultant. mike has a system for taxes — he has not filed since 2019 — and would bring, to the boardroom, a useful kind of pessimism about regulatory compliance. stefan, who reads “fairly seriously”, would be the head of marketing. homer simpson, the patron saint of confident wrongness from the long-running animated show, would be the chief product officer. the org chart writes itself. the org chart is, itself, a working illustration of how meaning slides when nobody is watching.

verdict, the i changes nothing and everything

so here’s where i land. imoron is, in the dictionary sense, nothing. a typo. a stray i. a slip of the thumb. it does not have a definition. it does not have an entry. it has, at best, a footnote in a search log.

but the typo, in my hands, on a thursday morning with the all-hands going on the third floor, has done a small piece of work. it has reminded me that the word “moron”, which i wear with a certain weary pride, is more flexible than i thought. you can hyphenate it. you can split it. you can prefix it with a digital-era i. and the word, in each version, picks up a slightly different texture. the moron is the long-form. the imoron is the consumer model. the straight dictionary version of moron, which i did not write but i did read carefully on a wednesday, is the encyclopedia entry. they’re cousins. they belong in the same group photo.

i am, for the avoidance of doubt, not arguing that imoron is a real word. it is not. but i am arguing — with the authority of a man whose qualifications consist mostly of a desk, a typo, and an unanswered text to mike — that the typo is a small, useful event. it tells you what the word looks like when it slips. it tells you that the language is still moving, even on a thursday, even when nobody serious is watching. and it tells me, sitting here, that i am the kind of person who will spend a morning on this and call it research.

that is, in itself, a credential. i’m putting it on the resume.

the all-hands wrapped, by the sound of the elevator, at 11:47. carla just walked past my screen. i tabbed out of the document. she did not stop. she also, possibly, did not look. on balance, i’m going to call this a clean run.

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