Have you ever looked closely at a train's wheels? They are much larger and much more intricate than you might imagine from the heights of a station platform. If you have any humility, you might think, Thank god someone else built that, because I never could. It’s so tempting to look out at the world, and think that it is so complex and immense that there must have been some sort of plan. It must have been someone’s goal – 200 years ago – to create an iPad. But it wasn’t. We got iPads in the same way we got all of Darwin’s finches: time, luck, and natural selection. Super intelligent AI is not inevitable. And the belief that it is: Inevitablism. I am not an inevitabilist. Nor am I a doomer, pimp, luddite, or spruiker. I am a simple skeptic.

Nothingburger is one of the Americanisms I have consciously integrated into my vocabulary. It’s just so completely weird, but also so sensical. Emptiness is better understood not by imagining nothing, but by imagining nothing between two burger buns. It makes the emptiness even larger. Like being naked except for a pair of shoes.

Tat is a word I’ve borrowed from British English after a childhood of watching YouTuber Ashens unbox cheap plastic toys, gizmos and gadgets. Tat joins a pantheon of similar words: knick-knack, trinket, tchotchke, bric-a-brac. But tat feels the most straight to the point. Tat. It feels closer to junk, crap, or shit. Stuff made to fill tips. Tat.

Smally is a word I discovered browsing the page, English terms with rare senses. It’s not hard to see why smally is smally used. The combination of -ly suffix with the double L ending of small makes for an awkward derivation both in speech and print. But there’s something ineffable about smally that endears me to it greatly. Smally loved, smally spoken—smally charms me to no end.