A recent Onion piece begins, “BROOKLYN, NY—Staring in trembling awe at her suddenly blank desktop, local woman Chelsea Greene was reportedly presented a rare chance at a new life Tuesday after accidentally closing her browser window with 23 open tabs.”

It occurred to me, as I read this, that it would have been lost on me if I had  read it in high school. In particular, my ignorance of three words–or, rather, their  particular meanings here–would have thrown off the sentence so badly that I would not have been able to make head, tail, or middle of it.

Moreover, I would have thought I knew the meanings of the words. Desktop, browser, tab–they wouldn’t have seemed obscure.

1. “desktop”–At the time, this meant nothing other to me than the top or surface of a desk. A “suddenly blank desktop” probably meant a desk that had just been cleaned, or whose “toppings” had been swept off. (Desktop computers existed but were not well known–and the word “desktop” as a computer descriptor had not entered general vocabulary.)
2. “browser”–I would have thought of this as someone who browses. Perhaps a “browser window” was a window near a desk, for those who wished to look either into their own library (in an adjoining room) or out onto the street. Maybe a “browser” was someone who stopped working now and then to observe the goings-on.
3. “tabs”–I suppose those are the little clamps that hold a window shut. Why on earth would a window have 23 of them? Maybe it’s a window that springs open unless clamped tight shut; so, since the tabs were open, it must have taken an act of extreme clumsiness to fling the window shut by accident.

So here’s what I picture: Someone, maybe a parent or spouse, is mad at Chelsea Greene for keeping a messy desk–and, in a fit of indignation, flings everything off the desktop. Stunned, Chelsea looks out the window, only to find that she has somehow flung it shut, maybe in the heat of anger or revenge, fling for flang. But this very emotion reminds her that she is still alive–that although she has “closed” the window, life has in fact “opened” itself to her, showing her, once again, that other people’s judgments need not dictate how she lives, and that her desk matters to her, even if things pile up upon it. If Chelsea had known of the Big Five, she might have said, “So, I scored low on your conscientiousness test, but not on my own; after all, I am here at my desk.”

Note: I added a little to this piece after posting it.