Words

Gibberish

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Today the Language Log blog noted that that Trump fellow was thinking of nationalising boating (sorry: ‘nationalizing’ (had to wrestle with my spelling checker to get that)). They attributed the error to “poor-quality speech-to-text” (I assume) software. But in this age of all singing all dancing AI wonderfulness surely we should have cracked this problem by now.

When I watch a video and click the ‘full screen’ option I find the screen fills with some text seemingly automagically generated from the dialogue in the video. But it is usually so inaccurate that you have to wonder why they bother. I am not sure who “they” are. It could be coming from YouTube but to change the settings I now have to sign in to Google – so that is not going to happen. Or it could be from one of the numerous browser extensions I have blocking most of the nonsense that the web criminals developers keep trying to inflict on us. For example a video from the Piano Circus website produced this:

Ignoring the lack of punctuation and the American spelling I highlight some errors in red. Gibberish.

The Myth of the Moth

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On Richard Osman’s House of Games this evening we were informed of the interesting fact that a moth once found inside a computer is why computer bugs are so called.

It is a good story but it is not a fact.

The word bug had long been used to denote some form of malfunction – as in a film from several years before the moth was found:


The Oxford English Dictionary has earlier yet examples:

1875
The biggest ‘bug’ yet has been discovered in the U.S. Hotel Electric Annunciator.
Operator 15 August 5/1Citation details for Operator

1889
Mr. Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering ‘a bug’ in his phonograph—an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble.
Pall Mall Gazette 11 March 1/1

If we are feeling fanciful we might find ourselves in the land of the Fairies where we might encounter a mischievous Welsh Bwgan up to no good.

So when the moth was discovered it was duly noted that an actual bug had been found rather than the mythical one that had long been blamed for such malfunctions.

It is a good story so it is a shame to waste it.