Eponymous Exploring: Why "eet"?

By nature, we English peeps love language. We love its parts. The sum of its parts. What lingers around the sum of its parts in shades of meanings, word families, etymological histories, possibilities.

Driving back and forth to my Rhode Island Writing Project Summer Institute this week has brought back the opportunity to re-imagine the language often trapped in my iTunes account. When Regina Spektor’s song “Eet” came on earlier this week I looped it. Take a listen:

I always wondered what "eet" really was, but never took the time to explore. To me it was likely just a continuation of  the “beat eet eet “of the song, but I remember of a student of mine mentioning how she learned that “eet” was the button that typed over a mistake on old typewriters. While it couldn’t delete in a modern way, it allowed for a letter to type over the original error. After searching for validation of this, I found an urban dictionary entry and this instruction manual but not much else for “proof.” We English peeps don't settle for this. 
 
I continued my search and what “eet” is for certain is a Chaucer-ized version of ate from the Nun’s Priest’s Tale which you can see below or listen to here.
 

What “eet” also is for certain is a symbol in logic known as a falsum denoting logical contradiction—it looks like an upside down “T” which I find charming. And what EET as an acronym could be is Extended EngagementTaxonomy, Eastern European Time, eet-cetera.

But I’d like to float around in the less certain to which I referred to at the start of this post. I’d like to reflect on “eet” in the typewriterly sense. What I like about the idea of the “eet” button is that it—rather than deleting—leaves a mark where a writer decided to acknowledge a misstep, to make a change, to move in a new direction. It’s not a whiting out or erasing. It leaves a reminder.

Unlike a Google Doc where once you make a change there is only a trace of it buried in layers of cyber soil, the “eet” button reminds you of where you changed. You stopped and went back in order to change.

I am naming my blog “eet” for this reason. And I love it for its ambiguity and its potential and I love that I can add my own acronym as an ever-evolving teacher, and enter into a professional community of others to help me acknowledge my missteps, to make change, to move in new directions.