Jesus fucking Christ. OK, so I’ve fixed my implementation of the “Even” theme. Turns out, as most problems do, it boiled down to “PEBKAC”. That’s right- Problem exists between keyboard and chair.

So, in my infinite wisdom, I had adjusted my config.toml to use language codes as most folks know them: "en-US". Right? Riiiiight?

NO. I said no.

In Hugo world, or at least this template’s build, languages are just “en” or “es” or whatever the fuck you speak.

# This is correct according to my theme's i18n/en.yaml
languageCode = "en"
defaultContentLanguage = "en"

So the above is valid for this theme’s config.toml. What I had been running for almost a year was:

# This is WROOOOOONG
languageCode = "en-us"
defaultContentLanguage = "en-us"

SO OF COURSE MY SHIT DIDN’T WORK. 🤦‍♂️

So, I adjusted everything to "en" and I could see my word count and read time. It probably fixed a whole host of other issues that I either am still not aware of or may never know. But, let me just tell you, it was fucking frustrating chasing my tail with this shit. The saving grace is that Hugo has a well-structured syntax, and I was able to look up important little facts like T is an alias for i18n.

So, folks, the important takeaway here is that:

T is an alias for i18n! If you’re trying to figure out what T is doing, check your i18n/en.yaml or i18n/en-us.yaml lookup files!