9 April—Remember Alexander Pope’s brilliant heroic poem The Dunciad? Sure you do. One of the memorable couplets in the little guy’s final version is “Thy hand great Dulness! lets the curtain fall, And universal Darkness covers all.”

Given all the hype and preparation leading up to yesterday’s solar eclipse, we all looked forward to universal Darkness covering all. (Note that Pope capitalized Dark three centuries before the Associated Press capitalized Black.)

Slow motion during and after the great event, then, the song by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller that Peggy Lee topped the charts with some 55 years ago came to mind: Is That All There Is?

Seriously. Yesterday’s highly anticipated solar eclipse turned out to be a giant nothingburger. Inside and outside The Monitor’s editorial offices in inner-city Litchfield, anyway. Had it not been drummed into our conscious that the moon was supposed to be blocking the sun (partially around here) in mid-afternoon, we shouldn’t have known it was happening.

The eclipse came and went and didn’t even darken the sky. Sure, the sun was partially obscured by the moon for a little while, which was barely evident if you looked up through your eclipse glasses. But for all intents and purposes it was just another overcast couple of hours.

So where was any darkness around Litchfield during the great eclipse? The only darkness we experienced was through the freebie ISO 12312-2:2015 Eclipse Glasses. And darkness certainly covers the aluminum-coated polyester-film lenses that are 100,000 times darker than whatever they’re supposed to be darker than and block most visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light.

What’s ISO anyway? Good question. Of course. It’s the International Organization for Standardization, an NGO, a non-governmental, international standard development organization comprising representatives from the national standards organizations of member nations. It was founded in1947 and has published over 25,000 international standards covering almost all aspects of technology and manufacturing. And so on.

The sole U.S. representative and dues-paying member of ISO is ANSI—the American National Standards Institute. ANSI, a founding member, naturally plays an active role in ISO’s governance and technical work.

But why is the International Organization for Standardization known as ISO? Shouldn’t it be acronymized or at least initialized as IOS? Like Apple’s iPhone Operating Systems, perhaps? Sure. So, you reckon, ISO must be the acronym or initialism for the International Standardization Organization. Don’t be silly. ISO is—guaranteed—the International Organization for Standardization.

ISO explains that its name and logo, which happen to be registered trademarks (as if anybody really gives a damn) came about because the founders—including the U.S., presumably—were concerned that acronyms or initialisms in different languages would be confusing. Good point. So ISO it is wherever and by whomever it’s known. Even in foreign alphabets.

Iso-, as it happens, is a combining form from the Greek ίσος (isos), which means “equal.” But ISO insists that any allusion to the Greek is purely coincidental. So forget about it.

And forget about yesterday’s nothingburger eclipse . . .