“Wait —” is a weekly newsletter in which Caity Weaver investigates an unanswered question in the news and pop culture.

Allow me to ruin your life real quick.

A few days into the new year, someone asked me, as a kind of puzzle: “What is a hole?” Right now, your brain is protecting you; human brains are poor multitaskers and since yours is occupied with reading, you haven’t yet had time to sit back and consider the question that has blown across the fecund wasteland of my thoughts nearly every day of 2019. The problem is that your brain cannot protect you forever. If you want to get off this ride, you need to do it now. At the end of this sentence, I will provide a hyperlink to take you to an unrelated page so that you can redirect your attention before any of what you’ve read thus far sinks in — except, as you can see, I have inserted the hyperlink well before the end of the sentence and you need to go back and click it immediately if you are planning to, since as soon as your brain receives the visual cue that this paragraph has ended it will be too late, because then you’re going to have time to start thinking.

What is a hole?

A hole is a portion of something where something is not. Beyond that, holes are slippery. (As a concept — only some in reality.) Is a hole necessarily empty on both sides, like the gaps in a slice of Swiss cheese? Or need it only be empty on one side, like a pit dug into the earth? Is a hole with a bottom less of a hole than one without one? Can a slit be a hole, or must a hole be vaguely round? Does a straw have two holes, as one Reddit user pondered, or just one — a single thicc hole, if you will?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest written attestation of the word “hole” (kind of) in English (technically) comes from the eighth century (though it’s actually probably the ninth) in a sort of Latin dictionary and translation guide. Here, the Old English “hol” is suggested as an equivalent of the somewhat obscure Latin term “spiramentum,” which later writers translated more specifically as “air hole” or “breathing space.”