Filling shoes and/or boots
Emptying a boot is a different matter entirely.
ChatGPT and the case of dactylic hexameter
Another chat with ChatGPT. This time, I asked it for a one-stanza parody of “The Raven.” It replied: Once upon a midnight dreary, As I pondered, weak and weary, There came a knock upon my door, From a creature, small and poor, Who begged for just a little more Of the bread and cheese I […]
Aardvark song revisited
Yesterday, I happened across my post from a year ago in which I asked an AI (not GPT) to write me a happy pop song about aardvarks. So I thought it would be fun to ask ChatGPT to do the same. On a side note, I was amused that signing in to use ChatGPT required […]
tudum
I recently heard about Netflix’s fan event, known as Tudum. But I wasn’t sure how to pronounce that word, nor what it meant. Took me a while, but I eventually found out, from a 2021 article: Netflix subscribers know the "tudum" sound when they hear it, but maybe not how to spell it until now. […]
ChatGPT: levels of diction, also poetry, also Lem
I recently chatted with ChatGPT (on December 9), just to see what sorts of things it would say in response to various prompts. Here’s a transcript of some parts of that chat. (The first response paragraph is a little long and dull, but I’m including it here in its entirety for comparison with the next […]
same shoe
Just saw someone on a BoardGameGeek forum use the phrase “I am in the same shoe with you,” which I don’t recall ever encountering before. I like it—it was immediately clear what it means—but now I’m curious about it. A Google search for [“same shoe with you”] shows only about 13,000 instances of that phrase […]
A girl named Jed
I’ve known maybe six or eight other people named Jed in my life, but all of them have been (as far as I know) male. Today I learned that Jed can also be a woman’s name. In 1993, a John le Carré novel called The Night Manager included a woman named Jed—a nickname for Jemima. […]
Mysterious Warbling
The TV show 1899 is one of those shows where everything is Mysterious. In particular, the music and sounds effects are very very Mysterious. Which of course means that the captions have to convey how Mysterious the sounds are. Fortunately, the captioners were up to the task. Below is a list of about thirty captions […]
condign
The noun form, according to the OED, is condignity, although Johnson lists condignness.
pasta
I just read a quote from a book review that included the phrase “complex characters trying to make sense of their worlds, their pasts, and their dreams.” But I misread pasts as pasta. And for a moment there, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that trying to make sense of their pasta might be something that […]