A Minor Complaint About Blipshift's Latest Shirt

As someone who has bought a Blipshift shirt (it was the Dat Asp, if you care) I now get their announcements on a semi-regular basis.

The shirt you see above, which celebrates the designer's 996 Turbo, is called "Eggolution". Which drives me absolutely nucking futs, because it's an example of how meaning gets lost over time.

To understand what "egg" means, let's return to the 1997 Boxster, which shared pretty much everything forward of the firewall with the 1999-model-year, 996-generation 911:

What you see there is Porsche's attempt to combine all the lights --- main, high, turn, and driving/fog --- into a single assembly. The point of this was to

a) get the lights out of the bumpers, to reduce the cost of low-speed crashes; b) to make the cars cheaper to assemble.

Since this is Porsche, you can assume that b) was the primary reason. Certainly aesthetics weren't anywhere on the list, since the integrated headlamp assemblies looked terrible from the moment the Boxster was announced. The North American Porsche-owner community, noting the unpleasant combination of turn signal and headlight in the same blob, called the headlamps "fried eggs". You can see it, right? There's the "yolk" in there.

Porsche knew they'd screwed up in at least two ways. The first way was in making the 911 and Boxster so obviously identical while charging twice as much for the former. The second was in the sheer ugliness of the headlights. So they tossed in a quick fix:

No more "yolk". So are these still "fried eggs"? I'd say "no" since they no longer have a yolk. But wait, there's more. The 911 Turbo debuted the mild facelift that would be applied across the board in 2002:

Now we've lost all resemblance to a fried egg. The bottom-heaviness is gone, and so is the "yolk". What we have is fundamentally the original 911 round light with an extension for the driving light. People still hated it, but they didn't snicker any more. A few years later, Porsche gave up on the idea entirely and introduced the oval-headlamp 997, with the turn signals back in the bumper:

So why, exactly, is the Blipshift shirt called "Eggolution"? Well, my guess is that it went something like this:

0. The original 996 and Boxster come out. The headlights are called "fried eggs". 1. Over time on Internet forums, the "fried egg" idea comes to be associated with all 996-platform cars. The same way that idiot SRT-4 owners call the cars "Skittles" even when you're talking about the black or silver cars for which there's no equivalent "Skittle" color. 2. This fellow buys an old Turbo (congratulations, by the way; it's the best of that generation IMO) and hears all sorts of "Fried Egg" comments. 3. So he takes it to heart and makes an "Egg" shirt.

All of this, really, in the space of under ten years. Is it any wonder that the same process, across a much broader human community and a longer span of time, has conspired to make "awesome" mean "good" and "terrible" mean "bad" and "love" mean "like"?

Awesome place settings at this restaurant! The old ones were terrible. Kinda love it!

I know what you're thinking. What difference does it make? But consider the following:

He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde In al his lyf unto no maner wight; He was a verray parfit gentil knyght. But for to tellen yow of his array, His hors weren goode, but he was nat gay. Of fustian he wered a gypoun,

This was written slightly more than five hundred years ago. It's unreadable now to anybody who hasn't taken the time to essentially learn a new language; Middle English is about as far from what we speak today as Portugese is from Spanish.

Now here's my pal Samuel Johnson, from 265 years agp:

When Statutes glean the Refuse of the Sword, How much more safe the Vassal than the Lord, Low sculks the Hind beneath the Rage of Pow'r, And leaves the bonny Traytor in the Tow'r, Untouch'd his Cottage, and his Slumbers sound, Tho' Confiscation's Vulturs clang around.

The needy Traveller, serene and gay, Walks the wild Heath, and sings his Toil away. Does Envy seize thee? crush th' upbraiding Joy, Encrease his Riches and his Peace destroy, New Fears in dire Vicissitude invade, The rustling Brake alarms, and quiv'ring Shade,

This is better, right? But unless you've been reading this stuff for a long time, it's slow going. I doubt that I could find one in fifty Millennials who could explain to me what Johnson means in the first half.

As the delta between current language and the language of the past increases, more and more of the past becomes essentially invisible and inaccessible to us, except through the "translation" of various people who almost always have an axe to grind. Can you imagine a world in which young people simply cannot understand Brave New World or 1984 or Uncle Tom's Cabin or Moby-Dick? Trust me, we're on the way.

I find this state of affairs terrifying. It promises to reduce us all to passive consumers of video content. Ignore the race trolling here and just think about the idea:

It's a hugely symbolic picture. And it promises a future where your content is "curated" into consumerist mush. "Not to worry," you say, "we can always learn to read the old books." Not anymore. It's already illegal to distribute pre-1985 books to children. Think about that for a minute. It's fucking Orwellian. Of course, you can always have Brave New World republished with lead-free ink. But the publisher might have "concerns" about "problematic" and "racist" sections. What do you do then?

We'll have true American samizdat. But it won't matter, because even if you put Kaptial or The Federalist Papers in front of a young person, he'll be unable to read it anyway.

Last one, from 1929:

But the beasts came on. One by one they emerged from the jungle, until the herd was gathered together again in a compact mass. Then, under the leadership of some big bulls, they advanced. It seemed as if they knew what they were doing, and were determined to revenge themselves by trampling the natives’ huts under their ponderous feet.

But Tom and the others were not idle. Taking a position off to one side, the young inventor began pouring a fusillade of the electric bullets into the mass of slate-colored bodies. Mr. Anderson was also firing, and Ned, who had gotten over some of his excitement, was also doing execution. Mr. Durban, after vainly trying to get his rifle to work, cast it aside. “Here! Let me take your gun!” he cried to Mr. Damon, who, panting from the run, was sitting beneath a tree.

This could pass for modern literature, right? It's a Tom Swift book. Aimed at eight-year-olds.

Not awesome.