{"id":5717,"date":"2026-10-22T08:15:59","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T15:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5717"},"modified":"2026-10-22T08:25:44","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T15:25:44","slug":"flashback-ive-been-to-distraction-on-a-thing-with-no-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5717","title":{"rendered":"Flashback: I’ve been to Distraction on a Thing with No Name"},"content":{"rendered":"

Decades back (in the early 80\u2019s, I think) I got a late evening call from my friend and SF writer Nancy Kress. She was something close to frantic. <\/p>\n

\u201cJeff! You gotta help me!\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cAnything, Nan.\u201d Far be it from me to leave a beautiful woman in a bad situation. <\/p>\n

\u201cThen quick: What do they call that tubey thing that pulls screen doors closed when you let go of them?\u201d<\/p>\n

Ulp. She could have asked me how to do I\/O redirection under DOS. She could have asked me whether Millard Fillmore had ever been on a US postage stamp. She could have asked me the atomic weight of Ruthenium. But no: She asked me for the name of a Thing With No Name. <\/p>\n

Not a horse. A thing<\/i>.<\/p>\n

So tell me: What is<\/i> the name of that long aluminum hydraulic gizmo that hisses coming and going and needs to be propped open with that little skewed iron washer that always lets go just when you\u2019re heading out the door with the old dresser that must not<\/i> be scratched? I doubt you\u2019ll do any better than I did. Sheesh; I could go out in the garage and build one for you\u2014but I can\u2019t tell you what it\u2019s called. <\/p>\n

Nan and I finally decided that knowing precisely what it was called wasn\u2019t germane to her story\u2014a little item called \u201cOut of All Them Bright Stars,\u201d which went on to win a Nebula award for her\u2014so we did the best we could and called it a \u201cdoor closer.\u201d That was its job, after all, scratched dressers notwithstanding. <\/p>\n

The following weekend I went down to Ace Hardware and prowled the aisles until I found a blister-packed replacement unit hanging on a peg. It was…drum roll, please…a door closer<\/i>. <\/p>\n

I was shattered. Surely it was a wheezyank or a tugtube or an Albemarle cylinder. Could there possibly be something that exists by the tens or even hundreds of millions around the country that has no name, and thus drives people to do the obvious and punt with so boring an appellation as…door closer<\/i>? <\/p>\n

Yes, there is. And by paying attention since then I\u2019ve run into a few of the others. <\/p>\n

One is a dog thing. Back when we lived in Rochester, New York I was sitting on the couch, watching Mr. Byte squirming around on his back on the living room floor, rubbing his nose on the carpet while making a don\u2019t-bug-me-I\u2019m-heavily-involved sort of noise halfway between a groan and a growl. It occurred to me that I had watched every other dog I had ever owned do exactly the same thing: Rebel, Yankee, Smoker, and now Mr. Byte. This was obviously Important Dog Behavior, at least as important as peeing on things when you\u2019ve long since run out of pee. So what the hell was he doing? There was no word for it, so I made one up: He was schnauzing<\/i>. From the German for "muzzle." What schnauzers do. And all other dogs as well.<\/p>\n

Fits, doesn\u2019t it? Now, please use this word every chance you get so that I can be cited in the Oxford English Dictionary as the person who coined it. <\/p>\n

Moving further out into the realm of abstraction, there is the problem that in English we have no single word for \u201cit is to be hoped that…\u201d Most people probably don\u2019t lose a lot of sleep over this one, but it does bother me. I used to admire the French for their terseness, after Sister Agnes Eileen explained to us in third grade that the last Tuesday before Lent was called "Mardi Gras" in French. As she put it, \u201c\u2018Mardi\u2019 means \u2018Tuesday,\u2019 so \u2018Mardi Gras\u2019 means \u2018the Tuesday on which meat may be eaten.\u2019\u201d Junior logician that I was, I unrolled the syllogism and assumed that \u201cgras\u201d in French meant \u201con which meat may be eaten.\u201d A dinner plate was thus an \u201cassiette gras,\u201d as was someone\u2019s upper plate, which most certainly is an artifact with which meat may be eaten. Don\u2019t tell me that \u201cgras\u201d means \u201cfat.\u201d Sister wouldn\u2019t lie. Maybe you got the accent marks wrong. <\/p>\n

So although I seek in vain, others in my condition have done the obvious thing and stolen another word that isn\u2019t used nearly as often: hopefully. Now, this word really and legally means, \u201cwith hope in one\u2019s heart,\u201d as in, \u201cExpecting some word about her order, she rummaged hopefully through the day\u2019s mail.\u201d That is, she rummaged through the mail, filled with a feeling of hope that PC Nirvana will finally either ship her damned mouse or send her a refund.<\/p>\n

Desperate word hijackers have taped hopefully\u2019s mouth shut to muffle its screams and begun using the word to mean \u201cit is to be hoped that…\u201d as in, \u201c\u2018Hopefully, my mouse will show up tomorrow,\u2019 she said, wiping the blood from her arrow keys.\u201d Complain though purists might, the crime\u2019s been committed, and the Law of Conservation of Syllables has been satisfied. Besides, people rarely use the word \u201chopefully\u201d to mean \u201cwith hope in their hearts\u201d anymore, especially when they\u2019re dealing with mail order computer retailers. <\/p>\n

Finally, there is what I can only assume is a Jeff thing, because I have never seen or heard anyone else encounter it. It\u2019s a Jeff thing in part because I keep my money loose in my right pants pocket, whereas most people keep theirs in a wallet. When I was fourteen I lost my wallet, and it had the $10 bill in it that I had received for Christmas from my godmother Aunt Kathleen. This cauterized me for all time on the issue of placing so vulnerable a substance as money in so losable a container as a wallet, which hangs precariously off your butt in the embrace of a loose fabric attachment that is far wider (but never deeper) than it needs to be. (Remember, when I<\/i> was fourteen, $10 was way<\/i> more money than it is today.) <\/p>\n

\"clip_image001\"<\/a>The Jeff thing in question is what to call the bills that have been sitting in the bottom of your pocket for several weeks. Cash always begins its life in a nice tight roll, but as you peel off a crisp 20 and hand it to the guy at Taco Bell, he hands you back a tatterdemalion wad of greasy ones and fives, which join their fellows in the bottom of your pocket, wrestling and twisting and doing everything but (sigh) reproducing.<\/p>\n

Years\u2019n\u2019years ago, before there were ATMs, I went too long without cashing a check, and finally had the occasion of pulling the very last bill out of the bottom of my pocket. It was a remarkably shaped thing indeed, a $10 bill that had spent time in the arms of the Muse, and emerged as something one might call \u201cwealth art\u201d with something approaching (but not achieving) a straight face. Hell, call it whatever you want to; I call it moneygami<\/i>. <\/p>\n

Everything should have a name. If you spot something without a name, give it one quickly, before somebody decides to call it a door closer.<\/p>\n

\n

Not entirely sure when I wrote this; I think 2004 but it might have been later. It was too big to put on Contra back then, so I posted it as a separate article on my site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Decades back (in the early 80\u2019s, I think) I got a late evening call from my friend and SF writer Nancy Kress. She was something close to frantic. \u201cJeff! You gotta help me!\u201d \u201cAnything, Nan.\u201d Far be it from me to leave a beautiful woman in a bad situation. \u201cThen quick: What do they call […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noneoftheabove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5717"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5720,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5717\/revisions\/5720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}