How I Turned a Detail into a Term Paper

In the beginning I was going to write a short article about economics. It was going to explain why simple, clear arguments are sometimes not just simple but simplistic and —- well, goddamn it

H. L. Mencken, satirist, social critic, cynic, freethinker (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

, they’re wrong.

It was going to start out with a quotation that I’d heard a while ago. It went something like this: “For every problem there is a solution that is clear, simple and wrong.” I wasn’t sure who said it, and I wasn’t sure I had the words right. Internet to the rescue.

What should have been—and was, a four minute search project (I have the records in my browser history) turned into more than twenty minutes of searching and reading, followed by about an hour writing a term paper—a long dissertation—explaining my search. It’s a distraction about a distraction, about a distraction. It’s typical.

But going against type, it’s being posted. Or will have been if you read this.

The story, blow by blow.

At 6:59AM I sat down to write my essay on economics. Rather than write the essay, then backfill the research, something that I’ve seen suggested, I started with the research. And as of this draft of this post I still haven’t gotten to the essay. But I will, I promise myself.

Onward. I started at 6:59 AM looking for the quotation that matched my memory.

Delightfully, less than four minutes later I had the answer. It was H.L. Mencken who said it, and he’d said a great deal more, besides. Sadly it was 7:15, now, before I managed to drive out the devils of distraction and settled down and write this post. There’s no telling how long it will be before I write the one I originally decided to write. But I’ll get around to it. And when I do, I’ll Let You Know That I’ve Written It, hereinafter ILYKWIWI, hereinafter pronounced ilik-wee-wee which deserves a post of its own, and ILYKWIWI.

I started with Google

Well of course, I started with Google. Where else would I start. Google doesn’t just know what’s out there, it knows what people mean when they don’t know how to say what they mean. I use Chrome as my browser (see a to-be-written essay about using Chrome, ILYKWIWI) so I started by typing in what Google calls the Omnibar, that thing up at the top of the browser that lets you type in web addresses, or search criteria, or—in my case, partial, half-remembered phrases in search of completion.

No sooner had I typed the first words of my wrongly remembered text, than Google provided me with suggestions, presumably based on Google’s analysis of others’ wrongly remembered texts. Specifically, when I typed: “for every problem” Google helpfully prompted, “for every problem there is a solution” and “for every problem simple solution wrong,” and several other variants, lost to memory and history, and who cares anyway?

Well. “For every problem simple solution wrong” seemed right. And selecting it gave me a search results page that matched my intention, if not my precise search criteria. What I’d love doing right now is to include a graphic, a screenshot showing you what I saw, but I’ve got myself on a deadline and I don’t have an easy way to do that. It’s possible I’ll come back and do it later, and ILYKWIDI. (Do It rather than Write It)

Anyway. For those who don’t know what Google (and most other) search results pages look like, here are the not quite a thousand words that match the one picture. Each result has a heading, in larger type and bold, usually the page title, then a few lines in smaller type that give the phrase in the page that matched your search, and finally the URL of the page referenced. Click anywhere and you go that page.

Brainyquote

The first search result was for a site called “Brainyquote” which, in the small print of the search results page gave the quotation much as I had wrongly remembered it, and credited it to H.L. Mencken, who I had vaguely remembered as the author. By pressing Ctrl as I clicked the entry I opened the page in the background, see reference ILYKWIWI and to the next search result. This one was from the more authoritative “Wikiquote” site, on the page for H.L. Mencken. In the small print it gave a slightly different, and presumably more accurate wording.

Everyone knows Wikipedia. Everyone whose breath fogs a mirror and has Internet connectivity, that is. Fewer know that Wikipeidia has brothers and sisters. There’s Wiktionary, a Wikipedia-like dictionary, and Wikiquote, Wikimedia’s answer to Bartlett’s Quotations. Wikimedia, of course, is the parent to all of the WikiChildren. I opened the Wikiquote page in the background and stopped reading search results because I trusted that I’d found my answer. While that page was loading, I switched tabs (see reference ILYKWIWI) and to see how brainy BrainyQuote actually was.

Not too brainy, it turns out.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” It said.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/hlmencke129796.html#wTTz75x4rHa4cWdU.99

That was nice. But I didn’t believe it. In Wikimedia I trust. I went to that page, which by that time, had loaded.

Wikiquote

The Wikiquote page for H.L. Mencken went on and on. Mencken’s was a brilliant, prolific and highly quotable writer. I’d never Mencken other than scattered quotes. I liked his voice, and resolved to get a book of his work from the library and fill myself with a bigger dose of his writing. Or maybe to read the page. Or maybe to do both. And maybe ILYKWIDI.

There, far down the page was the quote I’d been looking for along with references, not just to another self-hosted web page, but to source material:

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

H. L. Mencken, “The Divine Afflatus” in New York Evening Mail (16 November 1917); later published in Prejudices: Second Series (1920) and A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949).

No sense

We’re now four minutes into the project, and if I had any sense I would have quit right then. But I don’t and I didn’t. I’ll Let You Know When I Have Some Sense. (ILYKWIHSS). Instead I looked for other sites that had made reference to ‘Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem.’ That led me to a web site whose author had not only done Googling similar to what I had done, but had actually (he avers) gone to the Library, gotten the book and checked the page number!

It is Mencken’s 1920 book, Prejudices: Second Series, and it appears on page 158. The real quote is: “Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem —- neat, plausible, and wrong.”

The article was apparently written by an academic excoriating another academic for the sin of getting a quote wrong in the age of Google. So, of course, having no sense at all, I read through the rest of the article, and then another one, and then the about page for the site and next thing I knew I’d burned twenty minutes when I should have burned four at most. And fewer if I’d gone right to WikiQuote, do not pass Brainyquote, do not collect $200.

And finally!

And an hour later, and 775 words worth of first draft later I have the story of my scholarship, but no point. So I’ll have to go back in my second draft, and make the point.

And then, as always, the challenge is to quit and post the damned thing.

As always, if you see this, you’ll know I succeeded.

And then, what about that economics article? The one that starts with the Mencken quote? ILYKWIWI