SEARCH, FIND, SORT

posted by James Reel

    While checking out an Internet rumor at the invaluable and entertaining snopes.com, I thought I’d search the site for debunkings of urban legends and phony photos involving my instrument, the cello. But the word “cello” apparently appears nowhere on the snopes site, meaning perhaps that the instrument is too far off the cultural radar to be involved in wild tales (Giant alligator swallows cello whole!) or conspiracy theories (Chinese cello factories make endpins from metal illegally salvaged from World Trade Center debris!). Even though the search engine couldn’t find references to “cello,” it did return items involving words it determined to be somehow similar. The list of cello-related words, carefully sorted, tells a story I hesitate to explicate:
    soul
    sly
    slay
    cell
    sold