Throughout recorded history, humanity’s brightest minds have investigated the most abstract of ideas, pursuing the answers to the questions of the universe as valorous intellectual grenadiers. These logical chevaliers’ most noble form of expressing their pursuits has been the essay, since the age of Montaigne himself. But in modern society, with its online overtures, the essay has been overtaken by the colloquial post. Whether it be to reddit, Twitter, or a forum in the deeper recesses of “The Web,” these laissez-faire, anything-goes treatises have held the gravest of today’s wisdom. The creators of these posts follow in the footsteps of history’s greatest intellectuals, in the vein of Voltaire, Joan Didion, Jorge Luis Borges, David Foster Wallace, Susan Sontag and George Orwell. In respect to this noble art, we at the Zamböní have done our best to collect these great works of philosophical achievement.

And so here we have one of history’s most famous and controversial posts. Made in August 2015, this post was written by the famed poster Lord Hänsel von Kinderfreund, under the pseudonym of “19plato84.” If Eric Garland’s famed “Game Theory” thread is an analogue to the Federalist Papers, this untitled work on Andrew Clements’s novel Frindle serves as our counterpart to Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. Unfortunately, the page featuring the original post was locked and eventually deleted by the vile mods. Fortunately, pieces of the work were preserved through screenshots, and we have pored through the available texts to give the most accurate recreation of the post. Though we can doubtful recreate the post in its awesome, original form, we are confident we have preserved the dignity and language of the post, with only minor edits.

Does anybody remember reading the book Frindle by Andrew Clements? As a kid I thought that book kicked ass, probably because I read it really fast. I’ve decided to reconsider my former position though. I reread the plot on Wikipedia the other day, and it turns out it’s dumb as hell! The general story is interesting enough: a boy comes up with a new name for a pen, the titular frindle. His teacher, apparently an old hag who grew up with nothing to read but the dictionary (resulting in a near-religious devotion to the book), has a weird attachment to the word pen and decides that anyone who says frindle will have DETENTION, but her plan goes wrong when the word spreads faster than people start to care about what THE MAN has to say, and everyone gets detention, so she has to stop. Eventually frindle becomes part of the national dialogue and everyone starts saying frindle instead of pen. This in and of itself is actually not that bad of a skeleton. It’s a discussion of both the ways language evolves and the importance of creative expression that is accessible to young readers, certainly laudable traits. HOWEVER, there are severalsevere [sic] problems with the plot that keep me from recommending this book. The first of these is what makes the teacher stop giving everybody detention for saying frindle. It would make sense if the cause was the school administration pointing out the impracticalities (and probably legal problems) of keeping literally every kid in detention. However, the cause of the change is not that but rather a combination of parent complaints and a threatened bus driver strike.

Let’s unpack this. While parents’ concerns should certainly be heard by teachers, it is entirely unreasonable and frankly dangerous to allow parents to have a significant amount of input on how teachers keep order in their class. This sets a dangerous precedent for allowing parents to force the cancellation of classes whose message they dislike, or to prevent the punishment of their racist kid for saying racist things in class (a thing that happened a lot at my high school!). But much more ridiculous is the idea of a bus driver strike because of overtime. The image of the entire school bus fleet waiting outside the school from the end of the day to the end of detention is certainly a hilarious one, because it is so incredibly goddamn stupid to think that would ever happen. The buses would just start showing up later probably, or just leave when kids have detention. And even if they did stay just sitting in front of the school to wait for detention to get out, the bus drivers would be super happy to be getting paid overtime to literally do no work. This is basic economics. They’re unionized, and thus must have some collectively bargained overtime pay. This logic was poorly thought out.

Even more ridiculous than these, though, is the epilogue. The kid is now an adult who is apparently rich because of inheritance from his dad’s friend who got rich from buying the copyright to the word frindle (???????). I don’t think this is a thing you can do. How do you own the copyright to a word? Do you get royalties every time someone says the word? Did people transfer 10 cents to this fund every time they said frindle? Was there some sort of secret police to ensure this? Did the boy incite martial law? These questions are left unanswered. And why did this business guy decide to do this anyway? What kind of finance chud decides that some word to replace pen is the next big thing to invest in? This dipshit absolutely lost millions in bitcoin.

So the kid is wealthy based off of no labor of his own but rather through somehow owning a popular word. This is obviously problematic and really destroys any leftist goodwill built up from the pro union bus driver incident. But remember the old teacher from the beginning? Apparently she’s still around and she sends the kid (who recall is now an adult) a letter written when he invented frindle. She explains that she was only strict to popularize frindle and it turns out she doesn’t give a shit about pen after all. So this kid is not only wealthy from some bizarre financial arrangement and not through his own continuing contribution to society, but rather from a singular thing he did when he was 10 that was popularized as a result of the pain and suffering of his peers. This ending is dumb as shit!!

So Frindle has some stuff going for it. It has some good points about expression and linguistic development that seem especially relevant in this age where pop culture and social media change the ways we speak and communicate on a yearly basis. However, the economic message is ultimately one of unbridled capitalism: the suffering of an entire population is hand-waved away by an end result of the one shithead responsible for everyone getting in trouble reaping massive rewards that are entirely a result of this suffering. Thus, this book ultimately is one in favor of private prisons. In fact I’d go so far as to say it supports the Soviet Gulag, as the message is that it is okay to cause the suffering of everyone around you so long as you make a few bucks in the end. This book is for the birds!