The King Never Makes A Mistake

— J. Chr. de Vries

The decree that the king never makes mistakes has led to a number of curious but ultimately disastrous decisions. The origin of this royal decree has never been completely traced, but the trail of its consequences is still visible today.

To begin with, we see its consequences in the sometimes wonderfully inconsistent grammatical rules and practices. This is not unique in itself; similar inconsistencies can be observed in other kingdoms as well. For instance, in the realm of pronunciation. In English, we see this, for example, in certain words that differ by only one letter: ‘bow’ versus ‘cow’, or the sound of the double-vowel ‘ou’ in: ‘tough’, ‘though’, and ‘thought’. In Dutch, we see that the past tense of similar-looking verbs ‘kopen’, ‘lopen’, and ‘nopen’ results in three different forms: ‘kochten’, ‘liepen’, and ‘noopten’. We better not speak about the French numbering system; it seems like a math lesson. Two examples should suffice: the number 80 is ‘quatre-vingts’ in that language, and the number 81 is ‘quatre-vingt-un’; why an extra ’s’ in the number 80, and not in the number 81? Why ‘vingt-et-un’ and ‘vingt-deux’ (21 and 22) and thus not ‘vingt-un’ or ‘vingt-et-deux’? Answer: the French king never made a mistake.

All these language issues are at most inconvenient but certainly not catastrophic. In your own language, you learn to deal with inconsistencies playfully from your earliest years, and when learning another language, it just takes more effort, time, and especially practice to make all those exceptions a natural part of your language ability. That’s life.

Of a completely different order, however, were the ‘never made mistakes’ of the king of the land whose name is unknown. Usually, this vanished kingdom is referred to by the name ‘Nulla Terra’, but there are some theories suggesting this land might be Atlantis, others mention El Dorado, and yet others believe it to be the island Avalon. There are arguments for each of these examples, but there are no decisive arguments in favor of any one of them.

There are no direct sources about Nulla Terra; the most well-known secondary text on this subject comes from Sigwind Primus, also known as Sigwind the Chaste. He claims that the information he had at his disposal came from the tenth letter of Plato, but this cannot be verified as most of that letter has been lost; moreover, the authenticity of this letter is highly disputed. Sigwind’s text about Nulla Terra is also incomplete.

The most famous example Sigwind cites is the ‘never made mistake’ of the staircase. The king walked up the staircase of his palace to the balcony at the main entrance. He was presumably lost in thought, as he believed he still had one more step to go, but he had already reached the balcony. His right foot hovered a foot above the balcony for a moment before he realized he had already arrived. Since this could not be a mistake, it became tradition for everyone walking up a staircase to hold their right foot up just before reaching the destination, as in a sort of dance step.

Another example, which also contributed to the folkloric traditions of Nulla Terra, concerns the mounting of a horse. On an unfortunate day, the king, who was not known as a skilled rider, fell off the other side when trying to mount his horse. This method of mounting a horse was then instituted as tradition. Everyone who mounted a horse would first fall off the other side. The people developed an elegant climbing motion out of this.

On another occasion, the king, presumably again in a distracted mood, walked into a storage closet instead of exiting the room through the appropriate door. This too was made a tradition through a royal decree in the kingdom; new closets were even designed in rooms where they were missing so that one could walk into a closet before leaving the room.

More serious was the fact that the king had little talent for remembering names. Every time a person he had met before was introduced to him, he addressed that person with the wrong name. But since the king could not make a mistake, this became the new name of that person. This practice soon resulted in everyone in the land constantly having a new name, with significant consequences for the civil registry archives, mail delivery, and tax collection. The kingdom’s administration became a complete chaos, with disastrous consequences for the treasury. The economy of the realm collapsed, unemployment soared, and crime increased dramatically.

But what caused by far the greatest catastrophe was the abolition of the number ‘zero’. Whether this was a ‘never made’ mistake or a deliberately calculated one is unclear. Sigwind’s text does not mention an anecdote about the king forgetting a zero in some calculation. However, his text clearly describes a deliberate decree to address the declining economy. To this end, there had to be cuts to the national budget, and the king believed that abolishing the number zero was the best way to achieve this. After all, the thought went, abolishing one of the ten digits should lead to a ten percent reduction. The great advantage of abolishing the number zero was that this number was worth nothing anyway. Moreover, according to the theory, since the number zero no longer existed, the treasury would never be empty, as there was no longer a number to express that emptiness.

The consequences turned out to be utterly and absolutely disastrous, ultimately leading to the complete collapse of the kingdom. With the disappearance of the number zero, the concept of ‘nothing’ also disappeared. After all, if there are ‘zero’ coins in the treasury, then there is ‘nothing’ in the treasury. This meant that if someone was asked if they had produced something, they could not say they had produced ‘nothing’, which meant that everyone always produced ‘something’. This led to a massive decline in production because doing nothing still did not result in zero production. This caused laziness and apathy.

Blank sheets of paper were abolished, either by scribbling on them immediately, regardless of what with, or by burning them. This meant that it was no longer possible to create new texts, except by changing existing texts word for word. This was obviously a very cumbersome method of communication. New laws and regulations were formulated extremely slowly, if they were written down at all. Music ceased to exist, at least music with moments of rest. There always had to be sound, which meant that every piece of music became a form of noise. The symbols indicating the duration of a rest were abolished. For wind instrument musicians, this was unfeasible, as rests are necessary for breathing. Eventually, the rest symbols were also abolished from written text, such as the comma, the semicolon, and the period, the question mark, and the exclamation mark. No one could say ‘nothing’ anymore, so silence was abolished; everyone spoke continuously over each other, and no one listened anymore.

It is unclear how long the kingdom’s decline lasted, but it is clear that everything eventually disappeared; the economy, the history, the language, the art, the laws, and finally the name. Therefore, it will come as no surprise that there is another theory about Nulla Terra: one that states that the realm never existed, that it is merely a metaphor for the (im)possibility of making ‘nothing’ out of nothing; this theory again touches on the notion that Nulla Terra is connected with the concept of the Garden of Eden, with ‘nothing’ being a messianic suspension of time.

— J. Chr. de Vries, Bonnemort, April 1, 2024