We live in an age where truth bends to branding, where ignorance is monetised, and where a bit of adhesive becomes a cultural Rorschach test. Enter: Duck tape – the linguistic mangling of duct tape, now fully embraced by the commercial overlords who know full well that if enough people get it wrong, it becomes "right".
Let’s be clear – it was duct tape. Invented during WWII to keep water out of ammunition boxes, then repurposed to seal ductwork in post-war America. Strong stuff. Did the job. No-nonsense. Functional. You could argue it was the physical embodiment of common sense – before that, too, was rebranded into extinction.
But somewhere along the way, someone misheard or misread it – probably the same people who think nuclear is pronounced "nucular" – and duck tape waddled into the room. And like most errors in the modern world, instead of correcting it, we put it on a t-shirt, trademarked it, and sold it in neon pink with glittery unicorns.
The decline of duct into duck is a symptom, not the disease. It's part of the same cultural entropy that allows Farage to pass for a man of the people, or lets Brexit masquerade as sovereignty. It’s the same triumph of perception over precision – the same wilful ignorance paraded as authenticity.
So now we have children growing up thinking duck tape is the real deal, blissfully unaware that it’s a linguistic dumbing-down wrapped in shiny marketing. And we wonder why nuance is dead and populism thrives.
It’s not about tape. It never is. It’s about whether we still care about accuracy, history, and meaning – or whether we just slap a logo on our mistakes and call them success.
1 comment:
And, in fact, one thing that duct tape is useless at is for sealing ductwork. The heat from the air passing through the ducts makes the adhesive deteriorate. There is another product entirely for taping gaps in ducts.
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