Racking, Wracking and Cyberslacking

I was racking my brain, trying to come up with a clever phrase to open this post. As you can, see, I didn’t. But that’s because I got off track when I started to wonder if, instead of “racking” my brain, I might actually be “wracking” my brain. Either way, it was painful.

There was a day I would have consulted my trusty dictionary to answer such a question. But dictionaries are for people who don’t need reading glasses—or need them and can find them. The rest of us can now go to the internet and consult a search engine. The print is larger and, for me, it’s faster than finding my glasses.

After a quick search, I learned that I was most likely racking (stretching out, as with an ancient torture device) rather than wracking (ruining or destroying) my brain, which is lucky because I still need it.

I’ve been able to find answers to some of my most pressing questions on the internet, and some of them may even be right. For example, I found the cost of all the gifts listed in the “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” though not why anyone would want ten lords a-leaping.

And I learned what’s “corned” about “corned beef.” In case you’re wondering, the meat is cured by covering it with large kernels of salt that are called “corns of salt.” And “corned beef” does sound better than “kerneled beef.”

I was curious about what the majority of consumers call that bubbly beverage that comes in aluminum cans. And no, I don’t mean beer—or champagne. As far as I know, champagne doesn’t come in aluminum cans, but you could Google it to be sure. I typed in the phrase “soda or pop” and voila! Someone has thoughtfully created a map labeling each state: “pop,” “soda,” or “other,” which seems like a funny name for a beverage.

Awhile back I was tempted to use a cliché I’d heard about lemmings following each other off a cliff to their deaths. But I know nothing about lemmings and was therefore not sure if they actually do follow each other off cliffs. Maybe I’d misunderstood; maybe it was not “lemmings,” but “lemons” that follow each other to their deaths.

I turned to Bing the All Knowing and learned that the Norwegian lemming population level regularly rises to unsustainable levels, which causes it to crash. This abrupt drop has given rise to the myth of lemming mass suicide. I found no such information about lemons.

It’s probably clear by now that I don’t heed that old advice given to writers: “Write what you know.” If I would have, I’d have run out of material a long time ago.

Why should writers stick to what we know when we’ve got Google, Webopedia, Bing, Baidu, Ask, Dogpile, Duck Duck Go, Yippy Search and more? (I personally don’t use all of those. In fact, I’d never heard of some of them until I did a quick internet search for internet search engines.)

Back in the old days, if I wanted to know Barbie’s full name (Barbara Millicent Roberts) or the birthstone for August (peridot), I had to check an encyclopedia—or just make it up. Now I go to Google the Omnipotent where, for all I know, someone else made it up.

There’s another danger of wandering around on the Web. For me, searching for information on the internet is like following a butterfly. I land here, see something else that catches my fancy, follow that, land there and so on and so forth until the afternoon is gone and I can’t remember why I started searching.

I once wrote an essay about the foods served at Super Bowl parties. That’s always been more important to me than the game, no matter who’s playing. But when I searched for “Super Bowl food,” I discovered there were more than three million results. Do you know how long it takes to read three million results? Neither do I. But I almost missed the Super Bowl party trying to find out.

And a few months back, I went to the Web wondering if I could freeze butter. I’d picked some up at the grocery store, brought it home and discovered I already had a pound in my refrigerator. Fortunately you can freeze butter and, as it turns out, raw egg whites and tomato sauce. But don’t freeze cooked egg whites, cheese or macaroni, at least not if you want to eat them someday. I know that because I followed a link and then another one and another one. Meanwhile my extra butter was melting on my kitchen counter.

I recently went online to find out how many tiles there are in a Scrabble game. In case you were wondering, there are ninety-eight letter tiles and two blank ones. We have a scrabble game, but I haven’t seen it in years, so I decided it would be faster to search online than it would be to locate my own game. And it was faster, even when you take into account that I got sidetracked following a link to a story on seventeen ways to cheat at Scrabble.

Researching trivia has replaced walking back and forth to the refrigerator as my favorite way to avoid doing actual work at my computer. As I write, questions pop into my head and most of them have nothing to do with what I’m working on. For example, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Knowing that it’s approximately 252 is useful when Tootsie Pops play a role in what I’m writing, but up until this moment they never have.

Worse, I’ve wasted time researching when I could have been working or even licking an actual Tootsie Pop myself.

If you’re thinking it couldn’t have taken that long, you’ve apparently never blown an afternoon following one link and another and another until you’ve completely forgotten what your original question was.

Let me demonstrate. Let’s say I want to make a better meatloaf. Before I type the word “meatloaf” into the search bar, I have to get past my newsfeed. I seldom do.

There’s a story about what I should never do to an avocado (bake it), why they have shoulder buttons on women’s coats (to hold your purse in place), and how to pronounce Princess Eugenie’s name. I’ve never given this a thought, but now that you mention it…I click on the link and see a photo of Princess Eugenie wearing what looks like a satellite dish on her head. I love hats; I’m less fond of satellite dishes.

Suddenly, I’m overcome with curiosity. Why do royals wear such goofy hats? I type the question into the search bar and an explanation appears, but I don’t read it because my attention is caught by a sidebar: “The best haircuts for older women.” Now there’s news I can use. I start scrolling. I’m at thirty-two—the haircut, not the age—when my attention is snagged by another sidebar, “Why you shouldn’t add milk to scrambled eggs.” I don’t, but I can’t help wondering why I shouldn’t. It’s a free country after all. I click on the link and up pops a story and photo of scrambled eggs. Dang, I’m hungry. What should I make for dinner?

I have just whiled away an hour, and I still don’t know how to pronounce Eugenie, why she wears those bizarre hats, what my next haircut should be or how to make a better meatloaf. So if you want to know how, I’d suggest you don’t look it up.

There’s a silver lining though. When children of long ago had questions, their mothers often sent them to the encyclopedia. “Look it up,” they said, and obedient children did as they were told. More clever children realized their mothers didn’t know the answer but were too embarrassed to admit it, so they gave up and ran off to play. And foolish children asked older siblings who purposely misled them. That explains why, to this day, many adults think camels store water in their humps and chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

Things have changed. Today’s children look up information without being told to. And why not? Asking Siri or searching the internet is so easy even an adult can do it. And we do—all day long.