The Wit’s Guide to Entropy

Or, repress this mess

Frank Denslow created this Humpty Dumpty in 1903. Things have since deteriorated.

Entropy is always increasing, things are falling apart, the centre cannot hold, chaos reigns and … you’re laughing? Our futile attempts to stave off disorder are comedy gold, like the only I Love Lucy skit anyone still remembers, the one where Lucy and Ethel are trying to keep up with the chocolate assembly line. And if you don’t remember that skit, well, entropy.

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”
— Anthony Oettinger

Entropy is a great metaphor because no one really understands it. The more reputable physicists out there say that the best explanation is cutlery.

I was facing down a big deadline last week and procrasticleaned the cutlery drawer to the prelapsarian state seen at left. Soothing! And once, in a crazy person’s house, I was aghast to uncover the travesty seen at right. Disturbing!

“Organisms organize.”
— James Gleick

A more hopeful gloss on the science of entropy is that it tends toward freedom. Things tend to maximize the number of microstates they can be in, such as Monaco or San Marino. Things want to be free. If you release a particle and it floats away, maybe you shouldn’t have tried to keep it as your pet in the first place.

“If life gives you lemonade, make lemons. Fuck entropy.”
— Ken Jennings

More reading about entropy has led my thinking on the matter (and all matter) to become increasingly disordered. All things being equal is the heat death of the universe. Also, time is heat. That’s why winter goes on forever, whereas summer’s almost over. And why a watched pot never boils.

“I’m a study of a man in chaos in search of frenzy.”
— Oscar Levant

There’s a nice blending of the laws of thermodynamics with Murphy’s Law that goes like this: There’s a game that you’re already playing. You can’t win the game, because energy can’t be created. You can’t break even, because entropy. And you can’t stop, because absolute zero is impossible. It’s called Ginsberg’s Theorem after the beat poet, even though he seems to have had nothing to do with it. Again, entropy at work.

“Our current model for the universe is entropy, which at the daily level translates as: things fuck up.”
— Julian Barnes

One of the great comic novels about journalism is Michael Frayn’s Against Entropy, though due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics it was originally titled Your Fleet Street Novel and also goes by Towards the End of Morning. Frayn portrays a newspaper as an ordered description of yesterday, which means the process of creating it spawns a considerable amount of comic disorder. “Day by day the presses hounded him; with failing strength he fed them the hard-won pieces of copy which delayed them so briefly,” the poor crosswords editor thinks. “On and on they came! They were catching him up!”

“Our memories are card indexes — consulted, and then put back in disorder, by authorities whom we do not control.”
— Cyril Connolly

So boil all these disordered thoughts down to this: Perpetual motion is impossible because no machine is perfectly efficient. Some percentage of the energy you apply to any task will be lost to the universe. Ergo, given that it’s the middle of July and all figures are approximate, doing marginally less work won’t even be noticed. It’s a rounding error, so round down in your favour.

---

“Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.”
— Henry Miller

We were begged to choose skylarking last week, and we did not. So this week we’ll load the dice by mixing in a bunch of synonyms pulled from The Idler’s Glossary, an excellent little book by Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell. And we won’t ask ourselves: Is there a synonym for cinnamon?

All the words in Get Wit Quick No. 317 were in an order if not the best possible order. And look how early I managed to send it today! The newsletter mascot is an magpie named Magnus, truly an organizing organism, after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. If we can collect all the taps neatly in the ❤️ below, chaos can be temporarily averted.

---

All my GWQ VIPs get just a little bit more each week in a special segment we call Quip Service. This week:

Three acerbic observations on getting older: