Your Shoe Request Cannot be Processed
One of the great linguistic mysteries of our time remains the magical properties of a certain English phrase. The phrase seems common and plain enough, yet it harbors an almost quantum slipperiness of the kind that once would have been ascribed to witchcraft. We know better now than to talk of spells, but we are none the richer for an explanation or answer to this particular enigma. The phrase, of course, is “Please put on your shoes.”
Things we do know about the magical properties of this phrase: they are only in evidence when the phrase is directed at children; and, the subordinate parts of the phrase, i.e. the independent words, have no special qualities unto themselves. But combined together and uttered in order, the words…well, there’s no other way to describe it: they disappear as if never said.
I myself witness this miraculous failure of language daily with my own children. Each time I test it I am awed by its unflagging power. Simply put, it never fails to fail.
“Please put on your shoes,” I say to the eldest — and presumably most comprehending — of my children. And then I wait to see the phenomenon of anti-expression I’ve created. And there it is: the child, staring directly at me with clear eyes as I utter the phrase, will blink once, maybe twice, and respond, “Daddy, can I look at your phone?”
While frustrating that my communication is so impotent, the consistency of the effect is nearly comforting. If nothing else in our world can be trusted to survive or persist, save maybe death and taxes, I’d venture to say the self-negating power of this phrase is eternal.
I have personally tested the limits of the phrase’s ineffectiveness on four different children in multiple settings and with repeated attempts. I have even attempted to interrogate my test subjects about the phenomenon directly.
“Did you just hear me say, ‘put on your shoes?’” I might ask the child in a second attempt. To which, astoundingly, I often get an affirmative nod. “Then please put on your shoes,” I will repeat. At this point — and here is where the mystery truly takes on the trappings of the otherworldly — the child might even respond as if THEY UNDERSTOOD AND WILL COMPLY. “Ok,” they will say. And then they will run in the opposite direction of the shoes in question, find another adult, and demand cookies.
If I think too much about it I get scared. What kind of force of semantic evil is alive in our universe that could make a child agree to a notion that they clearly never heard and that might not even exist?!!
We are small, people. And perhaps the lesson here is more of a warning. A reminder that even the simplest, most straight-forward demands we make of our enveloping reality are so feeble compared to the indefatigable awesomeness of infinite Time and Space that we may as well keep our mouths shut.
I don’t know. I’m no metaphysicist. I’m just a humble man who knows magic when he sees it and has given up trying to put shoes on children.
