Facto or factoid?
Austin Frakt has started a Twitter string, partly prompted by an exchange with me, that has me troubled about the name of my blog, which was a casual accident.
The substantive discussion was about whether policy outcomes eventually settle policy debates (Frakt is skeptical). The Twitter shorthand is "fact or factoid?" That brought me back to what I thought I was doing in naming this blog.
I opened a space on Blogspot called xpostfactoid in 2004 and put up a handlful of entries about the Kerry campaign. It sat fallow until 2007, when Obama appeared on the horizon. The name was, I think one of those spontaneous puns that please the finder and then aren't given much thought. But it did later take on a significance to me that I'm now thinking was founded on a double error.
To me, the name signals that I'm not a journalist: I'm tripping along after the fact(oid), trying to make sense of things by the kind of close reading that's really just about my only skill. One fact that did trouble me a bit along the way is that the primary meaning of ex post facto is legal: it means passing a law that makes an act already committed illegal (and is banned by the Constitution). My pun played on the literal and now only secondary meaning: after the fact. But why "factoid," other than that it sounds funny because it alters a familiar phrase?
Long ago, a professor teaching a course on the teaching of writing asked me in class how I came up with ideas for my papers. I said I thought of it as picking threads. You read a text, and you pick at some rough spot, like recurrent water images or some little current of hostility for an alleged beloved, and you pick at it until a strand of related images or passages or whatever starts unraveling/growing. If it's core enough, you get the whole work re-spun in your hand, like the bird who unraveled Harry the dirty dog's sweater and made a bird's nest of it.
I thought of "factoid" in that way -- as a little tidbit, like a byte, to pick on and get at some larger, preferably hidden issue. The thing is, as this Twitter string brought me to realize, a factoid is not (usually) a little fact, it's a quasi-fact, a little turd of truthiness. "xpostfactoid" would then signify "after the phoney fact," which I suppose could work, if it's about setting the record straight. But it isn't what I had in mind, insofar as I had anything at all in mind, originally. (Though once again, it seems, I glommed onto the secondary meaning, which Merriam-Webster gives as "a briefly stated and usually trivial fact."
So: nice bit of close reading there, effectively deeming my blog a map of misprision. The hopefully-not-too-conscious hunt for a new name begins.
Or maybe there's a kind of fitness in punning on a pair of secondary meanings. You can't get any more xpostfactoid than that.