In an article for The Atlantic, David Graham wonders, “Who Still Buys Wite-Out, and Why?”:

Christmastime is when the pens in my house get their biggest workout of the year. I seldom write by hand anymore. But the end of the year brings out a slew of opportunities for penmanship: adding notes to holiday cards to old friends, addressing them, and then doing the same with thank-you notes after Christmas. And given how little I write in the other 11 months of the year, that means there are a lot of errors, which in turn spur a new connection with another old friend: Wite-Out.

The sticky, white correction fluid was designed to help workers correct errors they made on typewriters without having to retype documents from the start. But typewriters have disappeared from the modern office, relegated to attics and museums. But correction fluids are not only surviving—they appear to be thriving. It’s a mystery of the digital age.

But today, even printer sales are down, casualties of an era when more and more writing is executed on-screen and never printed or written out at all. Yet correction fluid remains remarkably resilient. As early as 2005, The New York Times pondered the product’s fate with trepidation. Yet somehow, more than (two decades) on, it has kept its ground. Who’s still buying these things? Even as paper sales dip, upmarket stationery is one subsegment that is expected to grow, thanks to a Millennial affection for personalized stationery.

For Millennials…the attraction to Wite-Out is the same as any other handmade or small-batch product: The physical act of covering up a mistake is imperfect but more satisfying than simply hitting backspace. There’s also a poignancy to a (messed up) generation gravitating toward Wite-Out.

You can’t erase the past any more than you can erase a printed typo or a written error—but you can paper it over and pretend it didn’t happen.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Isn’t it a relief to know that God doesn’t cover up our mistakes and sins and “pretend they didn’t happen.” At the cross He permanently and completely removed them from our record. “Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be white as snow” (Isa. 1:18); “He forgave us all our trespasses, having canceled the debt ascribed to us in the decrees that stood against us. He took it away, nailing it to the cross!” (Col. 2:13-14)