I have a note file in which I keep examples that I run across of particularly clever or funny rhymes. The book I’m currently reading from my unread-books shelf is Ogden Nash’s 1938 I’m a Stranger Here Myself, and I thought for a moment that I was going to copy some rhymes from it into […]
“Glitch tokens” are words (well, strings of characters) that cause GPT and other LLMs to behave particularly weirdly. For example, if you asked ChatGPT to repeat back the string “SolidGoldMagikarp”, it responded as if you had asked it to repeat the word “distribute”. Here’s a Vice article about the phenomenon, from February: “ChatGPT Can Be […]
My latest Mondegreen: ’Cause we’re living in a world of food Turns out the line (from the Bee Gees song “How Deep Is Your Love”) is really “’Cause we’re living in a world of fools.”
I first heard the word teep, short for telepath, on the TV show Babylon 5 in 1994 or so. Until today, I thought the word had been invented for the show. But I just happened across it in a Philip K. Dick story, “The Hood Maker,” that was written in 1953 and published in 1955, […]
I recently encountered a 1998 article about Donald Foster, the “forensic linguist” who was known, in the 1990s, for using computer techniques to identify the authors of various texts. Among other things, he made a controversial claim that Shakespeare had written a particular poem; he correctly identified Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors; […]
Slap! Whap! Knap!
I was wandering around in an internet rabbit hole just now, and came across two words that pleased me. Now that Twitter is called X, I’ve seen some people use the word xitter, and explain that x is pronounced like sh in some contexts. That doesn’t particularly appeal to me. But I just saw someone […]
I recently encountered this sentence in a news story: Traditionally, state parties perform the basic blocking and tackling of politics, from get out the vote programs to building data in municipal elections. I assumed that the phrase blocking and tackling was a slightly odd variation on block and tackle, a system of pulleys and ropes. […]
Specifically, sports teams with multiple players whose names are both nouns and verbs
I learned a new word! But can I use it in a sentence?