I Read That As…

You see a lot of comments on Facebook that start like that. Somebody will write something about guests in their house and you read it as ghosts, or somebody will say it’s a lovely day and the next comment will be ‘Oh, I read that as ‘lovely dog.’ It’s sort of the text communication equivalent of a mondegreen, and is almost always harmless, and sometimes a fortuitous substitution, like if you intended anchovies and threw in some chocolate chips instead and it wounds up being the greatest thing in the world, although I can’t actually imagine a recipe that would be true for, it’s just an example.
Anyway, I just saw some convoluted, nonsense chart about ideologies, filled with circles, lines and arrows, and where it had ‘civil society’, I read that as ‘chill society’ and realized right away that that is pretty much the same thing.
If everybody was chill with each other, we wouldn’t have any riots, because the police wouldn’t be murdering people, because they’d all be chill.
It was very much the Hippie ideal, as I remember it, as I thought of it. You don’t need a whole bunch of rules if everybody is being nice to each other, and letting everybody do their own thing, and letting the love happen.
The world isn’t like that, but it sure would be nice if it was.