The ramblings of a madman

I have something of an admission of guilt to articulate. I have just noticed that the username I chose for this blog, “thehumanwikipedia”, has been spelt wrong. I’m not too proud to admit this was almost entirely probably my own fault. But it does rub me up entirely the wrong way when such indelible errors are made, especially when I made them. Especially so when the error calls into question the very nature of the idea the erroneously-spelled username was initially trying to portray, in this case that I am bookish, smart and worldly. Especially when the original spelling of Wikipedia should really be Wikipædia if the Americans (and I’m referring to you, Jimmy Wales) weren’t so insistent upon buggering up the English language, but that is a gripe for another time.
Public apologies aside, isn’t it just typical though? I must have spelled wikipedia properly innumerable times when visiting it on the www, but the one time it matters how I spell it, or at least that I notice I’ve messed up, inevitably it goes wrong. Alright, fine, if you insist upon pedantry, I got it wrong.
It’s part of a wider phenomenon that we humans suffer I think. Our mouths (or in my case typing fingers) tend to go at a speed that leaves our brains sometimes wondering what in God’s name just happened. This is what leads us to accidentally insult our bosses, get into fights with drunkards or have sex with your best friend’s girlfriend. Remember, it’s not an excuse, it’s just an explanation.
When our brains go slower than other peoples’ mouths, we encounter what the French quite poetically refer to as l’espirit d’escalier, or “staircase wit”. This refers to the joke that you think of on the stairs on your way out of someone’s house that would have been hilarious in response to that thing that Moreen said about Arthur’s knee four hours ago. I like this phrase. I like it so much that I wrote this whole blog just to mention the phrase.
Sorry to have wasted your time.