Tabs Issue 67: Just ping me
After watching Wordplay, the documentary about crosswords, with my dad when it came out, we decided we should try out a puzzle. We started with a Saturday crossword, the hardest one of the week, promptly failed to find more than a single word, and concluded, on my end, that I was too dumb to do it, and on my dad’s end, that his knowledge of English/the US wasn’t sufficient. This is the Smundak way: find the hardest iteration of the thing, and a. fail, and consider yourself a loser, or b. succeed, but still consider yourself nothing compared to others who succeeded.
Nevertheless, two years ago, I decided to give it another shot, and it turns out that the crossword solved by millions of people daily is in fact doable. The Mondays give you confidence, the Thursdays, a rush of accomplishment, the Saturdays, a sense of superiority. A real gamut of smugness. Thank you, Will Shortz.
Solving crosswords is a tidy illustration of the tendency to consider the things we know to be obvious and the things we don’t know to be esoteric. When I see a clue for a random California city, “San _______”, I pity those who wouldn’t reasonably know the answer because of the accident of their birth, the poor saps. Similarly, I was outraged when my friend from Syria didn’t know The Great Gatsby even as I could not tell you the name of a single Syrian writer. And yet when I see a clue for Canadian ice hockey player Bobby Orr, I furiously wonder who in their right mind would know any hockey players besides Wayne Gretzky. When my friends practically yelled at me at a lunch for cutting Roquefort incorrectly, I felt similarly blameless: how was I, a humble American, to know? [For the record, when the Roquefort is in wedge shape, you cut in slices along the radius as opposed to from the inside out to ensure everyone gets an equal distribution of the good moldy bits.] The experience is a healthy reminder that so much of our knowledge is situational, cultural, accidental, acquired by osmosis. I am essentially recounting the idea behind the plot of Slumdog Millionaire.
Until we are confronted with the lacunae in our knowledge or in others’, we don’t know what we don’t know and we don’t know what we know. I’ve already touched on this in the Tabs about losing your mother tongue, which covered how education can create alienation from one’s original class. But the road to a higher class demands continuous confrontation with what you don’t know. I shared this five years ago, but it’s still good: Elena Ferrante’s Lenu, who is working class, realizes, upon meeting her college boyfriend’s parents who are professors, that they
excelled because they knew, without apparent effort, the present and the future use of the labor of studying. They knew because of the families they came from or through an instinctive orientation. They knew how a newspaper or a journal was put together, how a publishing house was organized, what a radio or television office was, how a film originates, what university hierarchies were, what there was beyond the border of our towns or cities, beyond the Alps, beyond the sea. They knew the names of the people who counted, the people to be admired and those to be despised. I, on the other hand, knew nothing, to me anyone whose name was printed in a newspaper or book was a god...I didn't know the map of prestige.
No need to go so far back in time. In an interview, Austen Allred, founder of coding school Lambda School, talks about how the training covers not just engineering but also the social skills required to be a “bougie tech person”:
The hiring process is not just a filter for skills, it's also a filter for class. And people don't talk about or acknowledge that. It's very clear in all these protocols that we have in tech that you and I understand, you have to learn them the hard way. […] There was this other time I was in college…I was hustling and trying to get into startups and there was this guy at a conference I wanted to work with, so I went up and talked to him. And I said what can I do to be like you? He gave me his business card and said just ping me next week.
I spent hours and hours and hours looking up what ping me meant. I couldn't find anything. So eventually I called somebody and said hey, this guy said ping me. What does that mean? How do I ping? And that person was like, no, no, it’s a call or an email or anything really, just reach out to them. Doesn’t matter how. That's all that ping means. […] There’s nobody that sits you down and says hey, you're gonna say thank you so-and-so, moving you to BCC. It's not hard, but nobody ever tells you that anywhere.
Everywhere there are sites of unspoken knowledge. I liked reading about how the costume designer for Succession, Michelle Matland, communicates this through what the incredibly named Tom Wambsgans wears. Tom, who comes from a Midwestern middle class background, marries into the extremely wealthy Roy family. “Tom’s wardrobe—flashy Italian suits by Zegna and Loro Piana (which can range from two thousand dollars to upward of fifteen thousand)—is meant to signal his status as an arriviste.” In another interview, Matland says, “He's certainly more willing than the rest of them to have an identifiable logo on his vest, whereas someone like Kendall [Roy] is wearing Brunello Cucinelli, which probably costs five times as much but it's understated. Kendall was bred to know the difference and Tom is just walking into it.” These are details that are not legible to me when I watch, which just goes to my point.
In any case, Tom has much bigger troubles in the show, but, like 9/11, this certainly doesn’t help.
Come back in another 3 years when I collect enough new material on this subject to cover it once again!
чудесно, Малышик! А я выучила много новых слов: smugness, the poor saps, arriviste