It was decided that since Man is not perfect, a word ought
to be added to the lexicon that described his shortcomings, of which there were
many. A maid, unsure of the heat of her fire, would burn the milk. A man would
become so distracted by the shape of a passing cloud that his furrows bent and
twisted behind his plow. Etc. And so the word "error" was invented.
At first, errorem
were seen as faultless, a condition of Man’s inherent imperfection. A cosmic oopsie,
if you will. A “my bad.”
But as the mistakes piled up, the word error came to refer to defects and flaws — the results of human or
celestial imperfection. “To err is to be human,” people said, thus letting themselves off the hook. Seeing no way to account for all the error, they decided that the very existence of flaws were proof that God existed, for if all were perfection, how could one appreciate the perfect?
Thus it came to pass that
people embraced errors as evidence of God’s work, including the best example of
all — people themselves. Only a perfect God could have the genius to create
imperfection, after all, they reasoned, with their faulty brains. Because this
was a very clever idea, people worshipped God all the more fervently than
before.
Some people, wanting to imitate God, deliberately made
things with flaws built in to demonstrate that they appreciated the Free Will
He had given them. After all, they could easily have made it perfectly if they
chose to. Amish women to this day include a noticeable mistake in an otherwise
immaculate quilt for this very reason.
The minions employed by whichever entity to scan in page
after page of old books so that Google may provide digital copies of them are
also subject to error, and partake of it often, with the dedication of supplicants
on a mission. Whether the person responsible for the many blurry pages in
William Carew Hazlitt’s book were merely distracted by the giddy joy of their
task or were deliberately attempting to imitate God, who knows. All we are left
with is the trail of whimsy they leave behind, holes in the text as impenetrable
as the mystery of life itself.
Old Cookery Books and
Ancient Cuisine, William Carew Hazlitt, 1902
Also from this book: Selling Coal To Newcastle
