Tag: Google

Trying to Get Verified with Google

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m trying to improve my search engine optimization over here. I’ve switched to a plugin that does much finer analysis of SEO than the one I used previously, checking for everything from proper URLs to sentence length.

And speaking of sentence length, my SEO software apparently thinks you’re all idiots, since it keeps warning me that my sentences are too long and complex for you to understand.

Anyway, I happened to discover today that I warrant a knowledge graph on Google—and in case you don’t know, the “knowledge graphs” are the highlighted results that show up in the right sidebar.

Hoping I could get my knowledge graph expanded, with maybe links to my social media accounts, I decided to try “claiming” it, which would allow me to suggest edits. I then discovered that this is quite an arduous process: Google demands screenshots from five accounts, a selfie holding official identification, a 500-character essay of self-abasement, a firstborn son, an immortal soul, and an infant sacrifice on the stroke of midnight of a Walpurgisnacht in which Venus is in retrograde and Jupiter burns in the twelfth house. Only then, Google might—might, mind you—deign to notice me with one baleful eye overshadowed by its majestic beanie cap.

Once I had finished the ritual ablutions and conducted the proper sacrifices, I presented my offerings to the great god Google only to receive the following:

Screenshot showing error message upon an attempt to submit a form

Apparently, I erred in the performance of the sacred rituals. Perhaps one of the tallow candles dripped imperceptibly on the magic circle, or maybe I inadvertently scuffed one point of the Druid’s claw with my shoe.

I shall see the oracle to learn what penances will appease the god, and then I shall attempt the sacrifices again.

Weaponizing [sic]

That’s sic, dude.

We’ve all seen “[sic],” and most of us have probably used it. This little word in brackets is, of course, a way to show that a quotation is presented as-is and that any typos, grammatical errors, or other problems are in the original, and are not the result of defective copying.

Out of curiosity, I looked the word up and discovered, to no surprise, that it’s Latin. It means “so” or “thus.”

In the age of the internet, sic occasionally gets used in a snarky fashion. I once read an entertaining essay in which a writer vehemently criticized another, quoted him frequently, and presented sic with every quotation as a passive-aggressive way of announcing that he considered the one he was quoting to be an idiot.

Urban Dictionary specifically points out this abuse of sic, quoting from Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves, “Book reviewers in particular adore to use sic. It makes them feel terrific, because what it means is that they’ve spotted this apparent mistake, thank you, so there is no point in writing in.”

In informally published internet writing, such an abuse of sic can be amusing, but in more official sources, it is obnoxious. I was aghast when I typed “What does sic mean?” into Google and got the following from Google’s built-in dictionary thingy:

used in brackets after a copied or quoted word that appears odd or erroneous to show that the word is quoted exactly as it stands in the original, as in a story must hold a child’s interest and “enrich his [ sic ] life.”.

Whoever wrote this definition went out of his way to correct [sic] something that is not an error. “A story must hold a child’s interest and enrich his life” is a grammatically correct sentence. In English, the masculine pronoun is used when the sex of the antecedent is unknown.

This is one small example of the magical thinking that afflicts our age, the belief that one can change reality by manipulating words. Some effeminate, lisping, limp-wristed, low-T weenie actually felt the need, even when engaged in an activity as necessary, unassuming, and (usually) wholesome as writing the dictionary, to signal his virtue by screwing with the language. The wiener who wrote this went out of his way to find an example for this definition that he could politically correct instead of actually correct, and he thereby rendered the definition false.

And that’s just sic and wrong.