everybody's constantly lying to you

and it’s lowkey unavoidable

I’ve been lying in every single video I’ve ever made.

Not in an intentionally misleading way, nor in a factually inaccurate way—it’s just been unavoidable. As I mentioned in my previous substack post, we can only ever think in stories, and lies are necessary for us to create those stories.

Etymology is a perfect example of this: take the word lowkey. If I wanted to explain where it came from, I could tell you any of the following stories:

• Lowkey started as a musical term for a muted sound, and was abstracted from that.

• Lowkey was a photography term for muted, low-contrast tones, and was abstracted from that.

• Key meant “important,” so low-key came to mean “of low importance.”

• Lowkey was an African-American English slang word popularized through social media.

• Lowkey used to be an adjective meaning “muted,” but shifted to become an adverb indicating intensity.

All of these stories are true, in that each explanation influenced the modern definition of the word. And yet, when we talk about etymology, we almost always present it as a linear story of “this word used to be X, and now it’s Y.”

In reality, words start out as T, U, V, W, X, and infinitely more letters before actually becoming Y. Any one framework or explanation is incorrect, but we have talk about etymology as if it’s simple in order to understand it. This is especially true on social media: if I wanted to make a video about lowkey, I can only really tell one of those stories, otherwise it’ll seem incoherent and people will scroll away.

So I tell little white lies, like every teacher you’ve ever had.

In physics, they often start out teaching children the Bohr model of electrons, because it’s easier to grasp than more complex models out there. The Bohr model is actually incorrect, but it simplifies for coherence at an introductory stage. Once you get really into physics and learn the other models, you learn they’re also incorrect because they can’t ever capture the complex nature of how electrons exist in the wild.

A lie, but a useful one.

This is the lie-to-children, the pedagogical concept that it’s easier to give technically incorrect explanations as a teaching method to simplify confusing subjects.

Not that I’m calling you a child. It’s just impossible to talk about a word without glossing over some aspect of it—really, to talk about anything. Reality is always more complex than our models. Some models are still useful, which is why I try my best to stick to them. Each model nevertheless advances some agenda or idea.

So I beg of you, whenever people present some neatly packaged explanation on social media, whether it’s political or educational or whatever, take it with a grain of salt. It might be part of the actual story, but the map is never the territory.