Ancient Internet History: The Trebuchet Tales
TREBUCHET TYPE SPECIMEN 2
Long, long ago, when the
internet was still relatively young and uncrowded, when rocks were still
soft and newly formed, and dinosaurs roamed the earth… you could enter,
say, “catapult” and get back results made up entirely of pages about
throwing things. True, the word “catapult” covered devices as divergent
as steam-powered naval aeroplane launchers and hand-help juvenile
pebble-throwers, but if you chose your supporting keywords thoughtfully
you’d get the right stuff.
Then, one day, something
happened. It was, I expect, one of those marketing or advertising fads.
Suddenly, all the job/career/business agencies discovered the word
“catapult” and ALL their sites used it as part of their names, their
programs or their slogans. “Catapult your business into the future” “Job
Catapult” … sigh… and very soon after that the software manufacturers
spotted the bandwagon and jumped aboard too. How depressing. From that
moment “catapult” was almost useless as a search keyword.
...Fortunately, the word “trebuchet” was out there… What does
“Trebuchet” mean? Ah, well there’s the problem. In addition to being the
name of a wonderful gravity-powered medieval military marvel,
“Trébuchet” is a modern French word.. a word in current use.
Scales: Look up the word trébuchet and you can find yourself reading
a fascinating French article about a merchant’s balance found on an
ancient shipwreck. A trebuchet is, you see, a small set of scales, a
balance.
Snares: Alternatively, a
trébuchet is a trap, eg for small birds, made like a box-shaped cage
with a tilting lid. …it’s that same balanced-on-an-axle movement…
Whoops!: To further complicate things, “to stumble” in French is
“trebucher”. I suppose you can see the resemblance to the siege engine’s
beam as it falls forward... but which usage came first?
Le Vin: On top of this Trébuchet is a French surname — and winemakers
Charton et Trébuchet, makers of fine burgundy, are often mentioned in
wine websites.
Complicated enough yet? Well unfortunately there’s more.
Fonts: A little while back there arrived a font named — you guessed it —
“trebuchet”. It wouldn’t have been so bad had it been an odd, obscure,
little-used thing — but unfortunately trebuchet is actually quite a nice
type face and is very popular. So now there are legions of websites out
there with the word “trebuchet” in their code… and, if the page was
written by one of those word-processor based code generating utilities
for the HTML-handicapped, it may well redefine its font face (and
therefore use the “T” word) every paragraph. Arggh!
So there you have it. In a way we should be grateful that the poor
search engines still perform as well as they do — and having to weed out
the chaff with clever keywords and cunning stratagems keeps us on our
toes.
Don’t forget though, that just because a site uses trebuchet font,
recommends M. Trebuchet’s wine and makes reference (in French) to
weighing machines or bird-catching, doesn’t mean that it isn’t also full
of wonderful siege engine information. Simple Boolean “not” operators in
your searches might lose you a lot of contacts.
Good luck and good hunting.