And still the S.E.C. chose to unknow it.
We'd say hello: there is no way to unknow the known.
"It's very hard to unknow what you know" agrees Paul Teulon, director of admissions at King's College London.
Unknown knowns were things that were not at all inevitable, and were easily knowable, or indeed known, but which people chose to "unknow".
It will be a happier new year if we can dispel some of that cloud, try to unknow less, and know a little more.
In that same essay, she said that her aim was to "unknow" the body: "Nothing leads — the body parts become equal.... Force the point of awkwardness".
Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister at the time of the rapid economic growth, merely boasted, "The boom is getting boomier," preferring to unknow the truth that booms always go bust.
It should have been not "what weaponry does Saddam Hussein possess?" but "Is Saddam Hussein's weaponry, whatever it may be, the real reason for the war, or is it a pretext confected after a decision for war had already been taken?" The answer to that was obvious and could have been known to all, but too many people chose to unknow it.
Since it's impossible to unknow this extinction possibility, we reached out to some experts to figure out what might happen if coffee disappeared tomorrow.
It's a textbook example of what Irish commentator Fintan O'Toole calls "unknown knowns," things generally understood to be the case, but whose reality we prefer to ignore, or to "unknow".
