In Internet forums and similar gatherings of cognoscenti, writers often use abbreviations for the sake of efficient self-expression. Here are some of the more common abbreviations you will encounter in Internet communications:

AFAIK: And furthermore, all is kaput.

BTW: Big tall weeds.

FWIW: Found watermelon, ingested watermelon.

IMHO: I may have overeaten.

OTOH: Over the old hamburger.

ROFL: Random outburst from lungs.

TOS: Terms of slavery.

TL;DR: Tried levitating; damaged rump.

A Windows user asked this question, and Dr. Boli thought he would refer it to the Windows experts among his readers:

Is it bad if the top tasks in the Task Manager, sorted by “total disk utilization across all physical drives,” look like this? We can see that there are three instances of Windows Problem Reporting running at once and wearing down the drive quite a bit, while the most disk-hungry process is Windows Modules Installer Worker, which we suppose is installing another instance of Windows Problem Reporting.

Dr. Boli’s assumption was that this was just how Windows works. Perhaps it is reporting the useful diagnostic information that the computer is running Windows, which it correctly identifies as a problem. But someone who knows Windows better might be able to give us a more nuanced answer.

Dear Mr. Flounder: I find myself in a very delicate situation. Two very nice young men are vying for my attention, and I like them both, and they both seem to have good prospects, but my mother says I can only marry one of them even though I’m a Mormon. So how do I choose? —Sincerely, Salt Lake Sal, the Belle of West Bountiful (Utah).

Dear Miss: In my vision, which came to me in muted pastel tones, I saw a graceful gazelle leaping across the African veldt, unless it was a savanna, because my visions sometimes mix those two up, but at any rate it was a gazelle, or at least some member of the antelope subfamily, and it was leaping, gracefully, as graceful leapers do; and gradually (still, you must remember, in muted pastel tones), the gazelle became a xylophone, which continued to leap, although not nearly as gracefully, and every time it landed it made loud clanking noises; and then a turnip rose up out of the ground and devoured the xylophone; which, however, continued to leap and clank inside the turnip, so that it was the loudest turnip you ever heard; and then instead of the clanking turnip, it was the sound of locker doors slamming, and I was back in junior high school, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t know where my locker was or what the combination was, and I had forgotten to go to all my classes for most of the year already, and now I was going to fail everything, and it was going to go on my permanent record; and then there was that gazelle again, leaping through the hallways of Elinor Glyn Intermediate School like it owned the place, and it went into the teachers’ lounge and closed the door behind it.

To interpret these visions requires delicacy and a sensitive appreciation of Jungian archetypes, so I was wondering if you have tried flipping a coin. I often make decisions by flipping a coin, or rather by having my staff flip one for me, since I am deficient in coin-flipping apparatus. I frankly don’t even know how I ever made it through junior high school.

A loyal reader would keep up with everything we publish in this Magazine. An efficient reader, however, would wait for the year-in-review article on December 31, by which time the wheat should have been separated from the chaff. That strategy might be more effective, of course, if Dr. Boli had not decided to publish an all-chaff Magazine in 2025.

In January, we ejected the word “share” from the English language, though only in certain contexts. We also published a newly discovered fragment of Finnegans Wake, which Joycean scholars are still coming to grips with, to judge by the fact that we have not yet heard any Joycean scholars rendering an opinion on the fragment.

February was International Anything-but-Haiku Month, in which we wrote a poem a day on a typewriter a day. We could pick our favorites, but you might as well just start at the beginning, because if you did not come here to waste time, you are in the wrong place.

March gave us a word game that most of our readers probably still have not completed.

In April, we chased a quotation by Sam Ullman and probably found Frank Crane behind it. We were considering the relative merits of youth and age, and the one thing we can say for our essay is that everybody got a little bit older during the course of it.

In May, for the convenience of the cardinals among our readership (we are nothing if not ornithologically inclined), we reprinted the Vatican’s Daily Conclave Announcements.

June taught us How to Write, with helpful photographic illustrations. We also learned why we should not judge Edgar Allan Poe by his most popular book.

July brought us The Adventures of Superego, a new superhero with a Malt-O-Cod endorsement contract.

In August, we discovered that the Voynich Manuscript had been even more figured out while our attention was elsewhere.

In September, because no one else would do it, or rather because everybody else was doing it wrong, Dr. Boli explained the obesity epidemic.

In October, we saw a few examples of How Modern Science Is Making Life Better.

November was an especially delightful month for young readers, bringing us The James Joyce First Reader and More Jokes for Kids.

In December, we prohibited the word “Indigenous” when used before the word “peoples,” and since then public discourse has been conducted with exemplary precision and rationality.

Now, what should loyal readers expect from the year 2026? Probably to have their loyalty rewarded with more of the same sort of thing, which is the most we can promise. As for the efficient readers, we hope to see you again on December 31, 2026.

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Once in a while, as regular readers know, Dr. Boli picks out a word that he thinks has lost all meaning and prohibits it. His prohibition means nothing to the world at large; it is merely a declaration that he will not take you seriously if you use the word in a reasoned argument.

Today’s verbum prohibitum is “indigenous”—specifically when it is followed by “peoples.” Dr. Boli has nothing against the word when it is used by botanists or zoologists, who may talk about the indigenous flora of New Caledonia or the indigenous reptiles of the Galapagos Islands to their hearts’ content with his entire approval. But “Indigenous peoples” is out.

Why does Dr. Boli make that sweeping prohibition? For the usual reason: that the word has become meaningless; and insofar as it has any meaning, it is wrong.

First of all, there are no peoples who are indigenous. The best guess of paleontology is that the human species developed in eastern Africa. Every human who is not currently in eastern Africa is descended from people who came from somewhere else. Every human who is currently in eastern Africa is almost certainly descended from people who went somewhere else, and then came back and kicked the older population out.

What, then, do people mean when they say “Indigenous peoples”? It’s a surprisingly slippery term. “Indigenous peoples,” says the Wikipedia article on “Indigenous peoples,” “are non-dominant people groups descended from the original inhabitants of their territories, especially territories that have been colonized.” We have already remarked on the difficulty with calling any inhabitants “original.” As for the other qualification, it adds another layer of absurdity: if your ancestors had dwelt on the site of the Garden of Eden since the time of Adam and Eve, you still could not be “indigenous” if you were “dominant.”

Indeed, the Wikipedia article admits the problem in the second sentence. “The term lacks a precise authoritative definition,” it says. But then it adds, “although in the 21st century designations of Indigenous peoples have focused on self-identification, cultural difference from other groups in a state, a special relationship with their traditional territory, and an experience of subjugation and discrimination under a dominant cultural model.”

There’s a lot to peel apart in that attempt at a definition.

The first qualification is “self-identification.” That means that if you call yourself “Indigenous,” the rest of us are obliged to take your word for it. We shall doubtless run into some difficulties with native-born Yinzers who insist on being called Indigenous inhabitants of Pittsburgh, but what can we do? They certainly are culturally different from other groups in the state of Pennsylvania. Furthermore, it is only quite recently that the Yinzer dialect has been embraced rather than deprecated and shunned by every Pittsburgher who gained a smidgen of education, so there’s your experience of subjugation and discrimination. As for a special relationship with their traditional territory, just try to take away a Yinzer’s black-and-gold anything and see where it gets you.

In current popular thought, however, there is a specific meaning for “Indigenous peoples” that the Wikipedia definition hints at but does not dare to say out loud. What we mean by “Indigenous peoples” (usually with a capital I) is “noble savages.” You can read about the Noble Savage at Wikipedia, where you will find that “One question that emerges is whether an admiration of ‘the Other’ as noble undermines or reproduces the dominant hierarchy,” so perhaps you might skip that article after all, because it doesn’t look as though you’ll get anywhere. Noble savages are good and wise with a deep natural wisdom, and we could all learn a lot from them, as long as we don’t actually have to be them. When we see “Indigenous wisdom” held up as a thing to admire, that is what is meant. The praise of “Indigenous wisdom” is merely the myth of the noble savage under a pseudonym.

Let us look, for example, at “The Wisdom of Indigenous Cultures” at EARTHDAY.ORG. It begins: “Of the more than 4,000 religions worldwide, several hundred are considered Indigenous religions, associated with distinct cultural beliefs and traditions.”

Right away we know we are in the realm of romantic fantasy, and specifically Western European romantic fantasy. If you try to pick apart that statement, you cannot find any meaning in it.

Let us take the example of Pittsburgh again. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were founded in Pittsburgh, and Pastor Russell, the Laodicean Messenger, lies buried here near a scale model of the Great Pyramid, which he believed was a complete prophecy in stone of the shape of human history. There are still Jehovah’s Witnesses in Pittsburgh, where the movement was born; they are therefore indigenous to Pittsburgh in the only sense of that term that has any definite meaning. Furthermore, they have distinct cultural beliefs and traditions: ask any former Witness who has left the movement and as a result has not been allowed to see her family for years.

But are Jehovah’s Witnesses among the faiths “considered Indigenous religions”?

Any religion began somewhere; if anyone still practices it in that place it is indigenous to that place. But that is not what is meant by “Indigenous religions.” Usually what is meant is “the religions of noble savages.”

We assign a romantic vision of goodness and wisdom to these noble savages, untainted by the things we recognize as worst in our own civilization. That seems very complimentary, so many people who belong to groups we would call “Indigenous” are happy to embrace it.

But many others are not happy at all, because they have realized that, in shrouding them in our romantic haze, we take away their right to be seen as people, as distinct human beings, with good and evil qualities so thoroughly twined together that the tangle can never be sorted out. We speak of their “wisdom” in just the same way we talk about how clever our dogs or horses are, and our patronizing kindness is the same. We despise someone who abuses “Indigenous peoples” the way we despise someone who beats his dog.

Then what should we do? The only way to bring “Indigenous peoples” back to a full measure of humanity in our own imaginations is to recognize that they are just as bad as we are. They are not worse, but they are not better. They are not a distinct variety of human—Homo sapiens indigenus—with a special gift of wisdom. Some individuals are good, some bad, some indifferent, most just scraping by like the rest of humanity.

Perhaps it is paradoxical, but we shall always see “Indigenous peoples” as less than human until we recognize that they have the same capacity for evil and the same fatal and stupid pigheadedness that we have. Then we shall at last see their individual virtues and their delightful peculiarities, and even their wisdom.

The first step along that path to full recognition is to give up the word “Indigenous,” which has picked up such a load of connotations and associations that it is broken. It no longer conveys any real meaning, and therefore, through the mighty power of arrogance, Dr. Boli prohibits it.

In reply to an advertisement from the Dairisophical Foundation that ran yesterday, KevinT asks,

Why does everything these days need to be a “journey”? Although, I suppose that a cheese wheel smooths the personal journey toward full spiritual potential.

Dr. Boli will not presume to answer on behalf of his advertisers. He can only offer his own opinion: everything is a “journey” because, if you actually reached the spiritual destination on offer, you would find it was not all it was cracked up to be.

What is “slop” in modern American slang? AI can tell you.

Γνῶθι σεαυτόν, as the graffiti said on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. This is, as the young people say, very meta.

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The screenshot extract from Google results is quoted for the purpose of mockery, which is one of the purposes that qualify as “fair use” in American legal theory.