I try not to be too judgy. Nothing good comes of it. But some things grind my gears—like seeing chocolate torsades described as chocolate twists. Or so I thought.

I wanted to write about how the word torsade has plummeted in use (it has). I wanted to rant about our waning connection to the original torsade aux chocolat (we’re losing it). I wanted to spiral into etymology—torsade, tort, the beautifully tortuous splenic artery—and not come up for breath.

But then I had a shattering realisation.

Retailers call them “chocolate twists” when they omit the traditional crème pâtissière. There is, if you will, a functional difference between the chocolate twist and the chocolate torsade.

This isn’t a dumbing-down of the language. It’s a dumbing-down of the pastry itself.

I’m not sure what’s worse.

A commonly heard refrain from officialdom:

Smoking and the use of e-cigarettes is prohibited at any time whilst on board.

About a decade ago, I was asked to comment on some public health messaging around e-cigarettes. There was—and still is—debate about the trade-offs: there’s clear harm reduction compared to smoking, but increased prevalence might bring new harms, as using these products is more harmful than choosing to do neither.

My concern, though, was about language. I’d never heard anyone outside the health world refer to them as e-cigarettes—people talked about vapes. The odds of a media campaign landing seem vanishingly small if it doesn’t use the language its audience actually speaks.

Others disagreed. They wanted to maintain an explicit association between these devices and the harms of cigarette smoking. In their view, calling them e-cigarettes was a helpful way to reinforce that link.

As it happens, I lost that argument—but I think history has vindicated me. The only time I hear e-cigarettes mentioned these days is in what I think of as official communic-ese—that peculiar dialect of unnatural, stilted phrasing found in corporate scripts and organisational policies. As above, whilst often falls into this category too.

Another ‘official’ script from a certain company includes the line:

Electronic devices with a ‘flight safe’ mode feature should have this enabled now.

‘Flight safe mode feature’? It’s such an ugly and unnecessary noun-phrase it makes me wince slightly every time I hear it. It’s not uncommon to hear whoever’s reading it stumble.

The basic function of this sort of scripted communication is, well, to communicate. Yet, it’s astonishing how frequently these messages are signed off, duplicated in their thousands, and broadcast across the world without anyone pausing to ask whether they’ll actually land. If the words don’t sound like something a real person would ever say—or hear—then they probably aren’t doing the job.

The image at the top was created with GPT-4o. AI image generation’s handling of text has clearly improved considerably of late.

I recently overheard two younger people talking on the bus. One said to the other:

I really struggle to use it: I don’t know how to use circle time.

At first, I assumed they meant some strange new productivity technique, or perhaps a revival of the classroom ritual where children sit cross-legged in a circle to share their feelings. But for some reason, my mind jumped to the Spirograph. I was simultaneously intrigued by this modern rebrand as Circle Time and not a little perplexed that teenagers would be discussing it with such gusto.

Weeks later, I read some idiotic commentary about smartwatches. Seeing the phrase mentioned again, I had an epiphany: ‘circle time’ was a baffled teenager’s term for reading an analogue clock—a face with hands, if you will. A concept once so basic it was used to teach toddlers, now esoteric enough to require translation.

And I realised: perhaps I’m not moving with the times. I spend a large proportion of my life at a desk with a tiny digital clock in the corner of several screens… and yet, I also have a little analogue clock sitting on my desk. If a meeting is approaching, I find it much easier to intuit whether I have the time to complete a task beforehand with a glance at an analogue clock than at one of the many digital ones. I’m from a different century.

As I wander around these days, my eye is often caught by civic clocks—at least half the time, they’re showing the wrong time. When society at large has given up on proper clocks, can we really blame individuals for no longer understanding them?

Perhaps it’s not just that we’re losing the ability to tell time, but that we no longer expect time to be told to us. It’s become something we interrogate individually, pixel by pixel, rather than something shared. The clock tower becomes ornamental. The watch, decorative. Time dissolves into digits.

Accurate, but only twice a day.

But there is one bright side in all of this: the aphorism ‘he has more faces than the town clock’ makes a whole lot more sense when those faces are saying different things.

You win some, you lose some.

The photos in this post are all my own.

A year ago, I wrote a post about the cost of the cheapest 500g bag of plain white flour at supermarkets near me. If that’s not top-drawer blogging, I don’t know what is.

With perhaps en even greater sense of scintillation, here’s an update:

Well, I wasn’t expecting that. The flour-based economy remains resilient.

The photo is ‘top view of baking background with flour and cooking supplies’ by Marco Verch licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.

Epictetus wrote:

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.

I think most people would identify with this quote on a sort of ‘individual topic’ level. If you’re a know-it-all in a field, it’s hard to admit that there’s something you don’t know, which is an obvious prerequisite to learning.

But I think Epictetus may also have had a bigger message: I think there’s an inverse correlation between ego and curiosity. The more you think you know in general, the less likely you are to notice things that don’t fit your preconceived notion.

Krishnamurti wrote:

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

The ability to separate observation from judgement is a key part of countless practices, from philosophy to psychology to management theory.

It’s only over the last week, though, that I’ve really noticed the link with ego—and how much harder it is for people with a large ego to make that separation. If you think you already know the answer, or already know how the world works, it is many times harder to look objectively at a situation and truly understand what’s driving it. Worse still, you might not even be motivated to try.

The disreputable former former former Prime Minister of the UK was quoted in their least-favourite newspaper this week:

I thought it was the wrong thing to do, and a bit petulant. Plenty of other European leaders sustain referendum defeats and carry on with their duties.

Once I’d processed the lack of self-awareness inherent in the hypocrisy of a certain eight-letter adjective, I came to reflect on the oddness of the word ‘sustain’. Things that ‘sustain’ us support or uphold us; yet we ‘sustain’ injuries and insults. How can it mean such different things?

It turns out that the word is derived from Latin: ‘-tain’ comes from ‘tenere’, which, as even a passing knowledge of European languages will tell you, means ‘to hold’. The ‘sus-’ comes from ‘sub’, as in ‘under’. So, ‘to sustain’ is to hold something up, supporting it from underneath.

Immediately, the two senses reveal themselves: things can support us, or we can do the supporting. While the former is largely positive, the latter is more complicated. We can hold together a friendship, and find that sustaining it is a wholly positive experience. Or we can hold up a weight that’s threatening to crush us, with almost unbearable burden and discomfort. The rich tapestry of life means that sustaining something can sometimes be both fulfilling and impossibly difficult at the same time.

To give the pompous wally his due, in the context of the quotation, ‘sustain’ could be read in the plain sense of enduring the defeat, or as a jibe about supporting the defeat by being a bit rubbish.

‘To sustain’ contains multitudes. It’s nice to see the complexity and ambiguity of the human experience reflected in language sometimes.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Yesterday, you might have been taken aback by the appearance of a certain ‘z’ on the WD Stephen’s fountain:

The engraved text refers to ‘great organizations’—but surely we Brits, and especially the fastidious engravers of fountains in the early 1900s, prefer our organisations with the letter ‘s’ in the middle?

The jarring truth is that we don’t: even to this day, Oxford University Press persists with the ‘z’ spelling. The ‘z’ spelling is the more traditional, owing to the etymological root in post-classical Latin organizare. The ‘s’ is a modern affliction. It seems to relate to the French spelling, organiser, though some sources suggest that the switch is attributable to the influence of printers who felt that it looked better on the page alongside all of the other ‘-ise’ endings.

I’m not with the traditionalists on this one: it’s ‘organise’ all the way for me, I’m afraid, even if the World Health Organization disagrees.

While you ponder ‘organisation’, you might wonder—especially if you’re my organist brother—what the word ‘organ’ is doing in there.

Well, the original meaning of ‘organise’—as you might guess—was to accompany with an organ. Someone might be singing, and one might then ‘organize’ the performance by playing along. The modern sense seems to have come about via metaphor: to provide things with a bit of structure and form is metaphorically quite like formalising some singing by ‘organizing’ it.

Perhaps because of my medical background, I had previously assumed that the ’organs’ were bodily organs, but that’s seemingly not the case—even though the two senses of ‘organ’ share a common Latin etymology (organum).

Come to think of it, it’s quite odd that a musical organ is both an ‘organ’ and an ‘instrument’, when ‘organs’ and ‘instruments’ are utterly distinct in the medical world… but perhaps that’s for another day.

The second image in this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I’ve worried about the Virgin Mary before, but this book review in The Economist gave me new causes for concern:

They knew that the Holy Spirit had made the Virgin Mary pregnant but that she was still a virgin. What they were not quite sure about was how those two things could both be true. How, in short, had God got in?

Theologians set about solving this riddle with great debate—and a healthy disregard for biology. Almost no orifice was off limits. God had entered Mary through her eyes, suggested one text. Another scholar thought He had come in through her ear. A third suggested that He had impregnated Mary through her nose—which was inventive, if hard to imagine being incorporated into the annual school nativity play.

This is one of those brilliant book reviews: it’s filled with humour and extracts the juice from the book without me having to bother with the whole volume. This seems just as well given the cutting verdict on the tone:

Mr MacCulloch’s great strength is that he knows a vast amount. His great weakness is that he has written it all down, over 497 pages, in a tiny font.

Oof. This is good stuff.

I enjoyed this extract from Oliver Burkeman’s book, Meditations for Mortals, and this imagery in particular:

A pair of images that help clarify things here are those of the kayak and the superyacht. To be human, according to this analogy, is to occupy a little one-person kayak, borne along on the river of time towards your inevitable yet unpredictable death. It’s a thrilling situation, but also an intensely vulnerable one: you’re at the mercy of the current, and all you can really do is to stay alert, steering as best you can, reacting as wisely and gracefully as possible to whatever arises from moment to moment.

That’s how life is. But it isn’t how we want it to be. We’d prefer a much greater sense of control. Rather than paddling by kayak, we’d like to feel ourselves the captain of a superyacht, calm and in charge, programming our desired route into the ship’s computers, then sitting back and watching it all unfold from the plush-leather swivel chair on the serene and silent bridge.

The point Burkeman is making is about knuckling down and actually doing the things one wants to do in life, but I liked this imagery more for its root in stoicism. Life is unpredictable, and the best laid scheme gang aft agley, as Rabbie Burns had it.

But I think there is something in Burkeman’s recognition that there can be ‘wisdom’ and ‘grace’ in the response. I usually associate those qualities with well-laid plans which come off, but Burkeman helped me to remember that it’s demonstrating them in the face of unexpected challenge which is both the most difficult and the most worthy outcome.

And it’s also a reminder that when we look at others and perceive them to be in their own superyachts gliding towards some goal, we are mistaken: in the end, we’re all in kayaks, and we’re all at the mercy of fortune and the unknown.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I have an on-off relationship with physical notebooks. Only last year, I mentioned that I transitioned to using OneNote; yet today, I’m back to using a combination of OneNote and a paper notebook from Papier.

I therefore very much enjoyed this book excerpt by Roland Allen in The Walrus about the history of Moleskine—the notebook manufacturer to whose paper diaries Wendy is especially loyal.

The non-standard dimensions, a couple of centimetres narrower than the familiar A5, let you slip the notebook into a jacket pocket, and the rounded corners—which add considerably to the production cost—help with this. They also stop your pages from getting dog-eared and, together with the elastic strap and unusually heavy cover boards, confirm that the notebook is ready for travel. The edges of the board sit flush with the page block, ensuring that your Moleskine can never be mistaken for a printed book. In use, it lies obediently open and flat, and the pocket glued into the back cover board invites you to hide souvenirs—photos, tickets stubs, the phone numbers of beautiful strangers. Two hundred pages suggest that you have plenty to write about; the paper itself, tinted to a classy ivory shade and unusually smooth to the touch, implies that your ideas deserve nothing but the best, and the ribbon marker helps you navigate your musings. Discreetly minimal it may seem, but the whole package is as shot through with brand messaging as anything labelled Nike, Mercedes, or Apple—and, like the best cues, the messaging works on a subconscious level.

My Papier notebook, I note, does not exhibit all of those features, and would be better if it did. I particularly liked the article’s take on the little leaflet that’s tucked inside Moleskine notebooks:

The leaflet opened with a lie (the new Moleskines were not “exact reproductions of the old”) then immediately veered toward gibberish, but that didn’t matter. Pound for pound, those seventy-five words proved themselves among the most effective pieces of commercial copywriting of all time, briskly connecting the product’s intangible qualities—usefulness and emotion—to its material specification, thereby selling both the sizzle and the steak. Sebregondi and Franceschi picked an astutely international selection of names to drop: an Englishman, an American, and a Frenchman encouraged cosmopolitan aspirations. “Made in China,” on the other hand, did not, so they left that bit out.

It’s one of those articles which is packed with insights and titbits I’ve never thought to wonder about, and I’d highly recommend giving it a few minutes of your time.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.