Clarification Nation

A lot of you have written to ask, why is the blog called "Hoses of the Holy"? Did I perhaps make a mistake, and mean to call it "Houses..."

Well... no. I called it that as a tribute to the internet's uncanny ability to mix good information with bad, to rank a trustworthy source alongside an untrustworthy one. To get things glaringly wrong, in other words, and yet preserve the wrongness for ever more, until it stands a very good chance of being seen as write. So, "hoses" because it's so easy to leave the "u" out of "houses". Or indeed, the "e" out of "holey" - not that "holey" is in any way a proper word. How often do you spellcheck a document and print/send it, only to realise that you misspelled a word, but in doing so, correctly spelled the wrong word?

So that's that. Our hoses are full of holes, or what the terminally pretentious and over-prepared undergraduate class like to call aporia (which my spellchecker hilariously thinks should be "opera"). Water, which in this case is metaphorical information, is leaking out all over the place, spilling everywhere, and yet so much of it is just plain wrong, or very misguided. Still, it's funny isn't it, when people get things wrong. Hoses is just funnier than Houses.

*Sigh* How I wish, as an undergrad, I'd had the wherewithal to ask, "Why are we talking about opera all of a sudden?" Then there was that word, extradiegetic was it? A word used by one of the Profs in one of his books - and yet a word that didn't even appear in the fattest, bloatedest, most multi-voluminous dictionary I could find. This is where your clear understanding, as a reader, just gives up and sits down to have a quiet weep. Everything from then on is only vaguely making it into the knowledge centres of your brain. I sort of think I know what you're talking about, only I sort of think I might not, too.

The innernet is like this all of the time.