Sam Redlark

image generated by Craiyon Below is my final response to the weekly Notes & Queries series that appears on The Guardian newspaper website, every Sunday, at around 2pm. It is described by the paper as a “long-running series that invites readers to send in questions and answers on everything from trivial flights of fancy to the most profound concepts.” I do not expect my comment to appear on the site. When I posted it, my account had been placed in a state of pre-moderation – a fence-sitting, but ultimately cowardly, means of censorship by stealth. Ordinarily on the site, if a comment is submitted and then subsequently removed by the jannies, a bookmark will remain, informing readers that the post was deleted for violating community standards. If an account is under pre-moderation and a comment is not approved by the jannies, then no such marker will appear. It will be as if the contribution never existed, and as if the writer never participated in the conversation. On a website t...