When is a French Keyboard Not a French Keyboard?

Recently my trusty old keyboard became too wonky for my level of patience, so off it went to electronics heaven. Too many cookie crumbs, too many coffee spills, I suspect.

I dug around my “bits and pieces” bin and found one I had forgotten about, set it up, and before long was using it to produce this very essay.

The only reason this one got superseded in the first place was that it is a French keyboard. Although my bilingualism is passable, I found I was just too lazy to remember all the punctuation keys, which are differently placed than on an English keyboard. (Give me a break– most of my francophone friends hunt and peck, too.)

This time, though, it occurred to me that the keyboard is functionally identical to any English keyboard. It only becomes a French keyboard if I change the settings in my computer. It’s only the symbol on the key which throws you, and if I wanted, I could re-label all the punctuation keys. But then I’d lose the learning opportunity, and at my age, any memory-training exercise is to be cherished.

All of this somehow reminded me of the first day of Contracts class, when Professor Hayek intoned in his lovely Czech accent, “Now, it’s not a contract because it’s called a contract. It’s a contract if it behaves like one, but it’s not a contract if it doesn’t do what a contract is meant to do.” That’s a lesson I took to heart not just for contract analysis, but for life in general. What matters is not the label, but the function.

Friends are not necessarily friends just because Facebook says they are. Work is not necessarily work if you love it so much it’s really play. Immigrants are not necessarily threats just because it’s advantageous for politicians to scare the bejeebers out of you.

If we train our minds to think in terms of function and not in terms of the labels that others put on things, we are liberated from the mind-control that society tries to impose. Is the breathless reporting of the Kardashians’ latest trollopism actually “essential news”? If my current four year old smartphone makes calls, takes decent photos, and surfs the net, is it actually “obsolete”, and do I really need to drop three grand on the newest and the latest? Am I getting pushed around by labels?

There’s much to be said for Emile Hayek’s advice not to be fooled by what things are called, but to discern what they actually do.

Don’t overlook the red and the blue!!! The boxes at the end sometimes just carry a bad joke, but oftentimes the real gem of the whole blog is to be found there.