So Here's a "thing"

And so it begins

Art © Michael Carson

And here we are. I haz done a Substack.

I suspect the advice is that to build engagement you should pump something out every goddamned day, but I want it to be a pleasure rather than a chore (for you) and having signed on for a few stacks recently, I’ve come to realize there’s a limit to how many perky little think-pieces anybody needs arriving in their inbox in any given week. It’s easy to lurch from “mildly interesting” via “another piece of content to be skimmed or thrown away” all the way to “Jesus, does he never shut up”.

So I shall try to remain mildly interesting. It may take me a minute to get the hang of that discipline, so bear with me while I find my feet… Do let me know via the comments if there’s anything you’d particularly like to see here, and please share posts with anybody you think might be interested… or passive-aggressively send them to enemies who you know will find them boring and annoying. Happy to help.

You’ll note there’s a paid subscription option. Diffident though I feel about this, it’s there for people who would like to support the posts. I’ll also be introducing features exclusive to that tier, like the full archive, monthly Ask Me Anything sessions about the creative process, and other cool and groovy things as I come up with them. For now, however, none of the main posts will require it.

As the name of the Substack suggests, I’m going to write about “things”. “Thing” is an interesting word in itself — pretty much all words are, if you stare at them hard enough — deriving from the Old English “þyng”. That symbol at the front is a letter that’s vanished from written English (it originated in a rune from Old Norse, one of many contributors to England’s mongrel tongue). It’s called “thorn” and it was used to denote a “th" sound, as found at the beginning of “that”. Of course “thorn” contains that very sound at the beginning of itself, and thus was generally written “þorn”, which, yes, looks amusingly like “porn”.

Sometimes, especially when painted, the loop at the top of the letter wasn’t completed — as in the graphic above, showing the letter’s evolution. This is why old signs in England would appear to have “Ye” at the beginning, as in “Ye Olde Pub”. That’s one theory, anyway: another is that once movable type arrived, printers didn’t bother to make blocks for the already-fading-from-use “þ” symbol, but substituted the readily-available and similar “y” instead. It’s possible both explanations are true in different circumstances: you’d hardly use movable type on a shop sign, for example.

Either way, it was never supposed to be pronounced “Ye”, but was instead a compact way of writing “The”, and uttered as such. The “e” at the end of “Olde” wasn't intended to sound like a “y”, either, but more like a very brief “duh” — so the whole thing would have sounded very much like someone saying “The Old Pub”, with a disappointing lack of old-timeyness.

The Old English word “thing” came from Old or Proto-German, and originally meant either “an appointed time” or an “assembly” (the latter would require the former, hence the crossover). As is so often the case (and this is what makes etymology so fascinating) the meaning of the word has evolved over time, wandering back and forth to attach itself to new senses as older ones became obsolete.

The term “henchman”, for example, initially referred to the groom who looked after a nobleman’s horse (Old English “hengest” (male horse) + “man”): but once horses stopped being such a big deal it slid sideways into referring to anybody closely attendant upon a person of importance, and thence to the modern sense of someone who follows a bigwig with slavish or unscrupulous dedication. Who, in other words, while receiving reflected power or status through the association, is nonetheless their bitch (a word which derives from the Old English “bicce”, and has by contrast steadfastly mainly meant the same thing — a female dog — for a very long time).

Back to “thing”. After a while it came to mean “matter”, in the sense of a subject of concern or interest (such as might be the focus of a meeting, rather than the meeting itself). By the late 13th Century it had expanded to be used widely of people, or creatures, or possessions, and since the 16th has been deployed in vernacular speech to indicate something the speaker can’t or doesn’t feel the need to give a more specific name in the moment — the sense in which we use it today.

It can now be used to refer to basically anything at all (and is a hard word to elude, as you can see from “any-thing”), whether animate or inanimate, concrete or conceptual. It effectively denotes “the current subject of my (or our) attention”, and that’s how I’ll be using it in this SubStack: bringing some-thing (there it is again) to my — or our — attention, and seeing what there is to say about it.

Don’t worry, it won’t always be about words, not least because I’m sure there are people already out there warming up their fingers to tell me that literally all of the above is calamitously wrong.

This was supposed to just be a chatty introductory post, but I now seem to have written a thing about a thing. About “thing” itself, in fact. How meta of me.

Who knows what excitements lie ahead?