The caption under this photo in Wikipedia reads: “A sign indicating where jurors are to conjugate inside Hillsborough County Superior Courthouse in Nashua, New Hampshire.”
Wait a second.
I looked up the word “conjugate” because that’s … wrong. It’s adorable, but it’s wrong. It should be “jurors congregate.” Right?
Then I thought, well, maybe jurors do conjugate. The “j” and the “u” are the same in both words, right? I did some poking around and I didn’t find anything in a definition for “conjugate” that really made sense in the context of the caption. But I could be wrong. After all, I’ve not studied law; I don’t know what jurors do. I’ve not served on a jury. I took an advanced vocab class one summer during undergrad and learned a lot of Latin roots and suffixes and things, but there’s a lot I don’t know about words. Jurors conjugate. Why not?
It seems like a small thing, getting words mixed up. The person who did the captioning got it wrong, I’m pretty sure, but I’m not sure beyond a reasonable doubt. I’m glad I don’t have to stake my life on being right or the caption writer being wrong.
I’m thinking in this way because I’ve been watching some damnable series on Netflix called “The Staircase.” Do you know what I’m talking about? It’s a documentary in 13 episodes. The filmmakers tracked — exhaustively, relentlessly, remarkably — a murder case which took place over several years in the early 2000s. I have no recollection of this case, but it was a big story in mainstream media, as the series shows. I won’t tell you everything that happens because I haven’t seen the last four episodes and I can’t bear to go through it all. Just know that the story is painful, sad, tedious, shocking, depressing, and discomfiting in the extreme.
Man, I ain’t got time to binge watch anything but my email box, and here this show goes and hooks me! I was going to take a walk tonight, but no way. I had to watch, and now I’m scared of being sucked into a murder case. A real one. I haven’t killed anyone. I don’t plan to. I would hope no one is out to kill me. But “The Staircase” shows these things can happen to anyone! We’re all just one Kafkaesque scenario away from a different, bad world.
The trouble with watching TV like this is twofold: You can’t look. And you can’t look away.