4 Incredibly Confusing Things (That Are Meant to Clarify)

Have you ever been trying to do something and every part of the process seems like it was designed to just make you more interesting to watch when God's TiVo breaks?

I'm not talking about when you asked your dad how to spell 'Celtic' and he told you to go look it up in the dictionary.

What the hell is a dict.... is this made out of paper?

No, that's just being purposely unhelpful. What I'm talking about are the things in our daily lives that are supposed to instruct, explain or clarify and just do the frigging opposite. Perhaps you've encountered the following:

4. Food Labels

Don't get me wrong. In general I'm totally in favor of ingredients being posted right on the back of that delicious Hot Pocket. I mean, back when I was eating Hot Pockets that sort of made me the kind of person who would never look at food labels, but hey, it was nice to know I could if I wanted to.

Fun Fact: On the label it tells you that 'Ham' is code for 'Rat Intestines.' Hot Pocket!

Once I became gluten free I thought that I would be grateful for food labels. I had to start checking the sides of cans more often than adolescent boys watching that one scene from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1.

It was a side boob joke. Here, I'm sorry.

The Myth: Anyway, I thought that knowing the ingredients in a plastic bottle of preservatives, meat scrapings and sugar would be nice. I could learn what I was actually eating and make sure that it wouldn't kill me. If it had a lot of words I couldn't pronounce I just wouldn't eat it. If it had gluten, surely it would tell me.

The first thing I picked up did not even test my skills as an English major. It was a bag of peas. On the ingredient list it said "Peas." The villagers rejoiced.

Then, though, I picked up a can of beans. Good old organic black beans, the least offensive packaged food. 

The Reality: It isn't real English on those labels. Can someone please tell me what soy lecithin and calcium disodium edta are? MS Word tells me that these are not real words, and we all know that Microsoft never lies. I mean, I see the words soy and calcium in there, which I guess is a good thing? But what the hell is lecithin?

This, apparently. In what appears to be a hospital bed pan.

The most frightening thing to me, though, is when the ingredient list really tries to help you out. Not in pronouncing the words (just give up now,) but in understanding which ingredients serve what purpose. For instance, after "Calcium disodium edta" they added parenthetically "(to protect color.)"

I ask you, how did that help me?

What color were these beans in the first place? How hard is it for black beans to be black? To stay black? (I swear, I'm not going to make a Michael Jackson joke here. He's dead, folks, let's move on.) What the hell is it that's being used to preserve these beans and what color would they be if not for this tongue twister of an ingredient?

The worst part is that the ingredients do nothing to tell me whether or not something is gluten free. Obviously I look for the word "wheat" first, but you'd be surprised the weird shit in some of these items. You thought caramel was just sugar and...then some more sugar? Me too. Turns out caramel coloring is consorting with the enemy. Who would ever suspect that?

So I've switched back to Hot Pockets. At least I know what's in those. 

Hot Pocket!

3. Footnotes/The Writing on the Opposite Page

Most people will at some point, in either high school or college, read a play or sonnet written by William Shakespeare. If you weren't one of those cheaters who just read Cliff Notes for Dummies, then you probably realized that reading Shakespeare is all about his masterful and poetic use of language.

And that that language is fucking incomprehensible.

"How should I know? No one talked that way in my day either."

The Myth: Enter the most helpful idea in the world: footnotes! See, Shakespeare's plays are meant to be watched (which is why he has little to no stage direction.) When you watch a play you learn a lot by the cadence and inflection provided by the actor. When you read it, it's just the worst kind of words: the ones that you know are referring to filthy sex and badass swordfights but in code.

"'Black ram tupping your white ewe'? Is...is that sexy? Or racist? I'm gonna go with racist."

Footnotes help you muddle through all that 15th century bullshit. You don't need to get absorbed in the poetry of the language, because you've got a bulldozer that will let you know that "canker-bit" means "eaten by worms." Hooray!

The Reality: ...Except, did that really help you understand what was going on in the story? I'm going to go with a big fat probably not. Having the meaning of a word written on the opposite or bottom of the page doesn't really do much most of the time. And it actually makes things worse.

Let's try something. I'm going to give you a line from King Lear. Let's see how helpful the footnote is.

"With him I sent the queen, / My reason, all the same; and they are ready / Tomorrow, or at further space,¹ to appear"

Follow the footnote indicator allllllll the way to the bottom of the page and then find your way back up here. Go on, I'll wait.

And hum the Jeopardy theme song quietly to myself 

Okay, you're back? Good job. Now let's think, did knowing that "further space" meant "later time" really help you understand the text better? Hell, when you scrolled back up did you even remember what the sentence was about? No, no you didn't. In fact, you probably had a better idea of the meaning of just that little bit of text before you jumped down to the bottom of the page.

You're trying to get the idea of the play here, not the etymology of every freaking word (although that's fun, too.) The teacher will probably be testing you on themes, characters and plot before they ask you what what Shakespeare meant when he used the word "happy²."

"Of course it doesn't mean 'happy'! F-."

2. Board Game Instructions


Board games can be fun. Okay, not Monopoly, unless it's been turned into a drinking game, but everything else is good. Most of them are pretty straightforward, like Trivial Pursuit or Candyland.

If you play this game often then you are five years old or suuuuuper high.

But sometimes there are awesome games that aren't self-explanatory. The brightly colored squares have no textual aids. You're thinking you might take a nap instead, or else turn the whole thing into an indoor version of Calvinball, which would admittedly be way better.

In the Calvinball version of "Life," this guy is actually the winner.

The Myth: Fortunately for you and your creatively-stunted cohorts, you don't have to make up the rules to Chutes and Ladders! You just read the simple instruction page and then--bam--you're on your way to doing something about as fun as bowling on a Wednesday.

The Reality: That's not how instructions work. If no one knows how to play the game, you have an extremely boring, frustrating half-hour that leads to hatred, break-ups and bad family talent show nights.

Of course he'll go for the piano. He'll always go for the piano.

Before everyone gives up and moves on to other things, though, there's always one person reading the instructions out loud to everyone else in a very authoritative voice, as though they get it, which they do not. It doesn't matter, though, because no one is listening anyway. The words do not seem to relate directly to the board, so they tune it out and hope that the authority figure will figure it out and put the instructions into plain English.

"And if you get past the gumdrop mountains you get--Jack? You listening?"

If you're this person, you have a lot of optimism. There's usually a lot of "No, wait, guys, guys, guys, this makes sense." Then you slow down, go back over the same thing you just read and they don't know what you're saying. Neither do you.

I was recently playing the Buffy the Vampire Slayer board game (because shut up, that's why,) and the instruction booklet was six freaking pages. That's not a booklet. That's a novelization. As I was reading I realized that none of the information was in the order I needed it. It was set up in categories of sheer knowledge dumps. What I needed was a step-by-step version: "You put your marker on the start space? Good. Step two is to go watch TV."

Meanwhile, everyone else hates you a whole lot. You were supposed to get this down, break it into bite-sized pieces and chew it for them. Instead you're like the asshole that dragged them to the new Michael Bay movie and made them sit through it while you commentated.

Or worse, a Michael Bay movie about a board game.

1. Dictionary Pronunciation 


As an English major, I am often afflicted by the supremely embarrassing condition of knowing a lot of big words and not knowing how to pronounce them when they are actually coming out of my mouth.

As you can imagine, I do not come away from these conversations seeming terribly intelligent. Even if I was using the word "indictment" correctly in a sentence.

My mother and I recently had an argument over the pronunciation of the word "banal." If you imagine the world's upper-crustiest Brit saying it, that's that camp I was firmly in.

Banaaaaal.

My mother was choosing to pronounce it as though it rhymed with "anal," as in "banal sex."

The worst kind of sex.

The Myth: If only we'd looked in the dictionary, right? Dictionaries come with those handy guides on how to pronounce things and then everyone knows and can use the English language correctly!

The Reality: Except we did look, and it didn't help. Seriously, plug it into Google or look it up in the dictionary. This is what you'll get: "bānl." 

(I can't even write that word in regular script in this blog post. I had to copy and paste it. Know why? 'Cuz those aren't real freaking letters!)

Doesn't that just clarify things tremendously? When I see that word, I do not think of "banal." I think of Dutch pastries.

Pictured: ˈbānl.

How is this helpful? Unless you're trilingual in English, Russian and the periodic elements chart, there's no way you're actually getting anything out of this trip to the internet. Wouldn't writing "buh-nawl" have worked, like, way better? Some people might still get it wrong, but at least it won't sound like they have Tourette's.

Then there are the Greek letters, the backwards Rs, the fucked-up, upside-down Es and occasionally letters that have never been near the word they're trying to help out.

Didn't know there was a J in "Prelude," did you? Go back to school, redneck.

Sometimes the sheer lack of order, sense and clarity just makes me want to quit the big book of words altogether. But then I remember that I'm not reading the dictionary, I'm reading the back of a can of black beans.

And everything totally makes sense.


^1"further space: a later time" Now, wasn't that important?

"¹happy: lucky." Seriously.