The sixth sense at work on the information superhighway

I never said any such thing

This year, I attended, having received two invitations to do so, a meeting that was held at the house of someone I know. We had socialised before and I had been a guest at his home before. However, I knew that I had no great need to be at this meeting and, in fact, no entitlement. One might regard the invitations as an extension of “come one, come all” hospitality but I knew that the auspices under which it was being held were such as to disqualify me—I was no longer a member of the organisation in question. I had my own interests in being there, nonetheless, which need not detain us at this juncture, for I recount the event solely because of the hearty greeting that I was given upon crossing the gentleman’s threshold, in the following terms: “We had a grrreat snooker evening last night!”

The said game of snooker had nothing whatsoever to do with the meeting that I had decided to attend. I replied, “Really?”, and left things at that. I was ushered into the capacious kitchen, where no refreshment was offered, and I embarked on one of the quests that had brought me on this journey to his door. It all felt as if I was very welcome, and yet not very welcome, at one and the same time. It is quite one thing to play snooker with, say, the Duke of Buccleuch, and then for the Duke of Buccleuch to come up in conversation and for him who played snooker with the Duke to mention en passant, “I was just having a game of snooker with the Duke of Buccleuch the other day.” But, whichever way you put it, we has a certain ring about it, of not you, especially given that I knew pretty much who had partaken of that snookering evening. I won’t say the lack of offer of a glass of water was insult to injury, but the welcome was cool, shall we say.

Teenagers are renowned in their years of rebellion for displaying notices on their bedroom doors, that, in a manner that is semi-tongue-in-cheek and semi-serious, is intended (much like the naval command repel all boarders!) to keep at bay those whose presence in the room is undesired (generally the parents of the youth in question). International border posts tend to be more formal, requesting travellers to show all passports. Other establishments may discreetly put up a sign with the legend private, members only or some such intimation of exclusivity. But, whilst we had a grrreat snooker evening last night! might not be expressly calculated to impart the same message as keep out, there is at least an argument that the febrile enthusiasm prompting such a verbal ejaculation was born of insouciance as to how the message would be received. At the same time, one cannot really take offence at the indelicacy of the statement, for it does not in any way contain the words keep out or equivalent and, ultimately, I wasn’t kept out anyway. Not in so many words.

I had cause today to read a 2020 piece on the web that refers to the murder in Minneapolis of, and I quote, black George Flyod. The article, which propounds some views that are, shall we say, worthy of reflection, looks to be competently written and well constructed, but contains some interesting spelling conventions. Having assumed that Flyod was a typographical error, I was more than mildly surprised to encounter the spelling a second, and even a third, time in the piece, which, moreover, does not once contain the name spelled in its more customary fashion: Floyd. The piece contains the words New Yok Times, which may, again, be a slip of the finger. The piece contains one other spelling error: Pilgrim’s Sociey instead of Society.

There was a time before spellchecks when I would regularly type comapny instead of company. So much so that I listed comapny as a word needing automatic correction to company in MS Word. So, I can’t rule out that the author of this piece has a similar tendency always to write Flyod instead of Floyd. Except that you can search the web and the spelling Flyod comes up with astonishing regularity.

Yok for York is also a common spelling glitch. Even on such erudite sites as that of The New York Times itself (one archived article about a speech by President Obama on Ebola in 2014), plus those of Forbes, and Sony Classical music recordings.

The problem with trying to discern whether a spelling error is due simply to a lack of attention on the part of the author or editor of a piece or whether it is intended to act as some sort of shibboleth, or secret sign to the initiated, is that you can just about type anything wrong in a search (or, and I tried it, seach) engine and someone somewhere will have mistyped it at some time in the Internet past. Therefore, it’s doubtful whether each and every occasion when that happens means one has stumbled upon the portal to some secret society, along the lines of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

It’s just that the piece in question has something interesting to say about egalitarian racism; I read it because I was unaware of what egalitarian racism is and am trying to decide if it’s not simply an alternative name for snobbishness. But the article also delves into the spelling conventions for the words Black and White, when used as racial references, and other articles I have located take a less conventional-wisdom viewpoint on the killing of Mr Floyd, and also misspell his name in the same manner as the article in question. If there is some subliminal message being conveyed by this transposition of the letters y and o, then I’m not as yet inducted into its finer points, but, if these finer points were there to be inducted into, I might be tempted to assume that Sociey and Yok were strategically placed to throw me off some kind of scent, even if I’m not entirely sure what the odour is that I’m smelling.

Whether it’s all throwing me off scents, leading me up garden paths or simply orthographic inaccuracy I cannot say. The article doesn’t tell me to not to read it. It’s not behind a paywall and doesn’t require me to log in anywhere. It doesn’t say keep out, so I went in. Just as I did that day to the locus of that snooker party. Because these are not events to make or break, not pivotal moments. They simply happen, and we note them along the way. Their portent may or may not reveal itself at some later date.

The web, hailed in its time as an information superhighway, has come to be feared as a source of dis- and misinformation, where discretion is advised and caution is the watchword. Far more than flagrant porkies, however, one does start to wonder to what extent the web is replete with info that the enquirer must dig for and, even when it’s believed to be found, will be retrieved accompanied by denials that are only too plausible.