One of the most charming aspects of English and many other Old-Norse-derived/-cognate languages are kennings. Kennings are words created by bonding multiple words, usually to poetic effect. The Beowulf poet speaks of “the whale road” to mean “the ocean.” Elsewhere, a “sword-storm” describes a battle. The kenning succeeds where its constituent words fall short on the same grounds as Impressionist art:

an artist's work as framework
+ the perceiver's personal history and experience
= living, breathing artistry

The infinitive to know is in need of rescuing.

Over these last ten years, I’ve been party to multiple conversations where misunderstood expectations around to know have hampered effective communication. While “to know” might have been wheezing under the just-in-time epistemology of the internet age, the arrival of AI in workplace, school and home is a type of respiratory failure for this overloaded infinitive.

An example from my own profession: misaligned expectations around “to know” or “knowledge” have proven onerous and lead to frustration on behalf of job role candidate and manager.

But using kennings to examine our usage of this verb might allow us to speak more accurately about our knowledge.

My colleague Max dropped a casual observation the other day that struck me (paraphrased):

There’s not a single day where I don’t wonder: “What did we lose in failing to make RSS the most foundational tool in everyone’s Internet consumption?”

There’s a couple of interesting implicit ideas here:

1. An internet experience where user agency and control is prioritized versus holding them in thrall like gawping punters is possible
2. An internet experience that is not a panopticon of surveillance capitalism designed to harvest us as fodder to an advertising Moloch machine is possible
3. An internet experience that allows creators to practice their craft as a career is possible. Which:
   1. Affirms the social and economic value of expertise, training, and insight versus booing the experts on cable news
   2. Undermines the ad-syndicate rentiers flourishing

I can imagine this agency-embracing alternative vision of the internet because I was there at all the forks along the way. I saw how we gently nudged ourselves ever-closer to a Burroughs-like Interzone. It wasn’t always like this, and I will tell you how we were slowly cooked alive – and how the escape is still there. To Max’s point, RSS was an agency-extending technology and it remains a powerful brick ready to be launched, Stonewall-like, into the torment nexus of the “attention economy.”

Let me be your tour guide on the footpath to hell, and, please, grab a brick on your way out.

The Ruby community was always marked by an especially playful character. I haven’t written Ruby in over 5 years, but I still remember that feeling of play. It always surfaced in the oddest moments where someone would go off on a tangent and you could see the humorous stinger coming from a mile off and then you’d think: “Wait, they’re going exactly were I thought they might be going with this.”

A notable moment was when David Brady noticed the irrepressible urge of Rubyists to misdirect so that they could land a joke once you resolved the cryptic crossword-like clue of the naming algorithm:

Avdi: I’m working on a gem [a library] called gem-love

[Other conversation happens]

David: I literally design around…[the question of names including “-” or “_” confusion]…by only using one word. And so, Avdi, I would have recommend that you rename your gem to glove. [Laughter]

David (continues): However, there is a cultural thing in the Ruby community that you must give your name just a weird ass freaking name that is surprising but inevitable. It’s like, before you hear the gem name, you should have no idea how to intuit the name of the gem. No way to predict it. But once you hear it, it should make sense. It’s the opposite of intuitive. So, your gem name Sir, isotoner.

After some laughter, James puts a capstone on the idea:

JAMES: [A] lot of languages, you have your extensions or whatever, your libraries being called something like XML::Parser, or whatever where it’s very self-descriptive. In Ruby, we don’t like that. We like the creative, Nokogiri means chainsaw…

Hearing James say this, I immediately worked out the chain…