Government Unveils “National Meaning Sorter” After Clipboard Accident Forces Country To Organise Every Word It’s Ever Said
WESTMINSTER—In what officials are calling “a brave, productive fabric of united decentralisation,” the government has launched the National Meaning Sorter (NMS), a box-stand-sized device designed to categorise every spoken, typed, muttered, doodad, and homake utterance in Britain into a single, searchable folder—after a minister allegedly dropped a clipboard in the Commons and accidentally spilled 40 years of policy buzzwords across the carpet.
The incident, now referred to in Whitehall as “The Blast Ripple,” reportedly began when a backbench MP attempted to balance a pen, a button sorter, and a ceramic capacity report on a granite countertop “for just a second,” only to be startled by a microphone feedback squeal described by witnesses as “a defensive muffle from the core kernel of the state.”
Within minutes, aides were seen crawling across the floor picking up loose policy fragments—“privacy,” “encryption,” “firewall,” “unregulated,” “makers convey,” “whereas states”—and stuffing them into a bag marked: IMPORTANT: DO NOT MIX WITH SANTA.
A Wallpaper Of Concepts, Held Together By Molasses
According to the Home Office briefing, the NMS will act as a national wallpaper of ideas, cushioning the public from the chaos of language by arranging words into neat categories such as:
Economic: capacity, manufacturer, gaining, findings, settings
Security: firewall, encryption, privacy, undercover, rule
Geological: basalt, granite, plains, river junction, bog
Seasonal: santa, cherry, sun, eclipse
Food Security (also just food): samosa, shrimp fried rice, chocolate, whole grain, molasses
Animals (including the ones in the cabinet): fox, boar, bull, catfish
Physics For People Who Are Already Tired: quark, nucleus, radiation, reactivity
Things We’re Not Discussing In A Family Newspaper: “NSFW,” “nudity,” and several items now stored in a redacted folder titled “somewhat asked nobody”
Civil servants insist the system is “multilingual forward search,” allowing any citizen to type “maze sneeze spelling” and instantly retrieve the relevant 200-page consultation document, two contradictory ministerial interviews, and a photograph of a wooden desk with a bag on it.
“It’s about uncovering meaning,” said one spokesperson, standing beside a grass verge where a temporary kiosk was offering commemorative graphite pencils and a cushion shaped like a kernel. “We have to control the fabric of the forge of the nation’s memory. Otherwise we end up with… well… faff.”
The Lukas Protocol: From Blaze To Byte In Three Easy Steps
At the centre of the NMS is what officials call the Lukas Protocol, named after a senior adviser who reportedly shouted “Lukas!” during the clipboard incident, though a rival account claims it was “Look out!” and everyone simply inferred the rest.
The protocol works in three steps:
Capture: Every utterance is entered via microphone, keyboard, or “wry nod,” then saved as a byte in a secure folder.
Consolidate: The system compares each word against the national dictionary, the national conscience, and a laminated chart titled Is Thick?
Sort: Any word deemed too “awesome warfare” is moved to a separate partition labelled “Undercover Undiscovered Horrors,” alongside “acid,” “deadly,” and “vomit,” which the press office stressed is “metaphorical.”
A trial run in a Midlands call centre reportedly processed 90,000 customer complaints, three poems about a kiln, and one handwritten note that read: “no car, night drive, false boar.” The system filed it under Transport > Rural > Existential.
Decentralisation Arrives, Immediately Centralised For Safety
Despite branding the project as “decentralisation,” the NMS is, in practice, stored in one highly secure server room beneath a desk that “used to be a mantel,” protected by a firewall, a ceramic catfish statuette, and a polite sign reading: DO NOT ENTER SOMEWHAT.
Asked about this apparent contradiction, the Secretary of State for Settings and Encryption replied, “It is decentralised in spirit. The spirit is in a bottle. The bottle is in a folder. The folder is in a bag. The bag is in the nucleus.”
A leaked memo further reveals the NMS will be powered by a “polymer-based crystal kernel” with “silicon reactivity,” which experts say is an ambitious way of describing “a computer.”
Citizens React With Brave Confusion And A Mild Fever
Public response has ranged from cautious optimism to the kind of blank stare normally reserved for a “bull in a wallpaper shop.”
“I just wanted to sort my memory,” said one local resident, clutching a clipboard and looking as if they’d recently been through a maze. “Now it’s asking me whether I mean forge as in industry, forge as in lie, or Forge as in a mage class from that game my nephew plays.”
Another citizen described the rollout as “like being hit by a bright blaze of helpfulness,” adding, “but also I sneezed, and it filed my sneeze under ‘implication’.”
A third person reported that after searching for “cherry,” the device suggested: “chocolate,” “sun,” “eclipse,” “venus,” “pear,” and “countertop,” then auto-generated a 600-word review of cubic fighter jet procurement “based on nose.”
The NSFW Folder, And Other National Mysteries
While officials deny censorship, the NMS includes a “sensitivity sorter” that relocates certain words into a sealed cabinet. When journalists asked why “NSFW” was being grouped with “privacy,” “unfair,” and “oppression,” the spokesperson responded by coughing, consulting a laminated rule sheet, and saying, “We are protecting the public from… loose windings.”
The same module reportedly flags phrases like “sexual” and “sex” and replaces them with “arena,” “cases,” or “trees,” depending on context.
“We’re not prudish,” an aide clarified. “We’re just mindful. Britain is entering its thirties again, culturally. It’s complicated.”
Scientists Warn Of Unexpected Side Effects, Such As Meaning
Academics have raised concerns that placing the entire nation’s vocabulary into one system could trigger unforeseen consequences, including:
Over-interpretation: citizens discovering what ministers actually said
Undercover coherence: policy documents accidentally becoming readable
Semantic radiation: stray buzzwords leaking into everyday life (“Pass the samosa, whereas states…”)
Graphite dependency: a sudden national craving to write things down “just in case”
Ripple effects: each new word causing a blast of related terms that “hops” across topics like a catfish across a bog
One linguistics professor described the NMS as “a kiln for language,” adding, “they’re firing it too hot. You can’t just throw in bull, santa, uranium, and a button sorter and expect a stable glaze.”
The Department for Bright Uncovering responded by commissioning a “review into the reactivity findings,” to be conducted by a panel consisting of a baker, a maker, a firewall enthusiast, and “a brave mage from the private sector.”
A Nation United By A Single Search Bar
Despite the criticism, ministers remain optimistic that the NMS will finally bring the country together.
“Every argument ends the same way now,” said one MP. “You simply type your complaint into the search bar—‘unregulated drive byte night’—and it returns the official position, the unofficial position, and a helpful cushion recommendation.”
In a demonstration for the press, the Prime Minister typed: “privacy volume wooden crystal polymer”.
The device hummed. The microphone clicked. The firewall blinked. Somewhere deep in the nucleus, a tiny kernel of logic tried its best. Then the screen displayed a single result:
“Based on inferred implication, your request has been filed under: FAFF.”
The room fell silent, as if the whole country had briefly remembered something important—then immediately forgot it, because it hadn’t been sorted yet.