Words of the Day 2025-07-17

Patient readers: This feature started out as a list of links with quotes. That seemed too much like Water Cooler to me, and I already have a Water Cooler, so who needs two? A friend pointed out that Water Cooler was very visual, and so I made “Words of the Day” very textual (weaving in text and texts as a theme). Suggestions welcome! —lambert

Word of the Day: Abject. Abject usually describes things that are extremely bad or severe. It can also describe something that feels or shows shame, or someone lacking courage or strength….. The word’s Latin source is the verb abicere, meaning “to throw away, throw down, overcome, or abandon.” Like reject, its ultimate root is the Latin verb jacere, meaning “to throw.” Subject is also from jacere, and we’ll leave you with that word as a way to change the subject.”

“Youtube review: ‘What Hygiene Was Like During the Black Plague’ by ‘Weird history’ ” [Fake History Hunter (via)]. From the YouTube: “The plague doctor costume became emblematic of the era. The birdlike mask worn by doctors held dried roses, herbs like mint, or spices thought to protect against infection.” But: “There is no evidence at all for the costume existing during the Black Death or even the middle ages. The first mention of it dates to the 17th century (!) and even there’s very little evidence for it having been worn by more than just a couple of physicians.” • See here. NOTE I’m having a lot of fun looking at RSS feeds. People are still out there blogging! I found this post at Feedle (“It’s a world of feeds”), an RSS aggregator that enables search. Interestingly, the search results are themselves feeds.

“Elmore Leonard’s Perfect Pitch” [The New Yorker]. I enjoyed reading the quotations from Leonard more than I enjoyed the New Yorker’s arch prose stylings:

“I used to drink mostly bourbon, over crushed ice, fill up a lowball glass. I also drank beer, wine, gin, vodka, Cuba Libres, Diet-Rite and scotch, and rye with red pop, but I preferred bourbon. Early Times. I knew a guy who drank only Fresca and chartreuse. I took a sip one time, I said to him, ‘Jesus, this is the worst drink I ever tasted in my life.’ He said, ‘I know it is. It’s so bad you can’t drink very many of them.’

That said, Leonard coverage is good to see. His routine from the days of his first marriage, when he still wrote mostly Westerns:

Up at five o’clock sharp for two hours of uninterrupted writing (still two pages completed before putting the water on for his morning coffee), then showered and suited for the office—ready to wolf down breakfast and help Beverly feed Jane, Peter, and infant Christopher—then receive the Eucharist during eight o’clock Mass. Finally, he arrived at Campbell-Ewald [an advertising agency] by nine.

Impressive. Not sure I could do without the coffee, though.

On this day: 1717 George Frideric Handel’s “Water Music” premieres on a barge cruising the River Thames in London. Suite #1:

“Did College Admissions Just Become an Episode of Black Mirror?” [The College Navigator (via)]. “Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, also co-founded Schoolhouse.world, a free, online, peer-to-peer tutoring platform - home to Dialogues. As Khan put it best when describing Dialogues: ‘High-schoolers will log into a Zoom call with other students and a peer tutor, debate topics like immigration or Israel-Palestine, and rate one another on traits like empathy, curiosity, or kindness. The Schoolhouse.world site offers a scorecard: The more sessions you attend, and the more that your fellow participants recognize your virtues, the better you do.’ … [E]ight colleges actually love this idea”: Colby, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Northwestern, University of Chicago, Vanderbilt, and Washington University in St. Louis. “And so this fall, they will begin accepting ‘Dialogues’ portfolios from Schoolhouse.world as part of students’ admissions applications. It’s called a Civility Transcript.” • If you can fake civility, you’ve got it made!

“Use a lot of words” [Seth’s Blog]. “AI systems like Claude and ChatGPT let you attach a PDF or text file to your query. Here’s the useful hack: Create a document that has pages of background. Your medical history for example. Include your age and every interaction you’ve had with the medical system, including illnesses and drugs and outcomes. Now, every time you ask a health question, attach the document. Or, a copy of your resume, work history, letters of recommendation and career goals, all in a PDF. Upload it every time you’re asking for career advice. It works for business plans, for customer lists and even legal documents. Upload an entire email correspondence, or a fifty page wine list. AI isn’t impatient, easily bored or distracted. It’s insatiable. PS chat GPT knows a shocking amount about you, while Claude starts over every time. Neither promises airtight security, but then again, neither does American Express, Visa or Google.” • My real resumé? Why?

Quote of the Day: “Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man’s head.” —Ambrose Bierce

“The Blogging Process” (2003) [Salon (via)]. Handy flowchart:

If I’d see this in time, I would have included it in my introductory post on blogging.

So gay:

Just a random thought, but it seems to me there’s a conservative tendency to think that words have single, precise meanings that are not subject to context. The same thing happened with DOGE and “probationary” employees. The probationers were in fact promoted civll servants, the best of the best, though that’s not the ordinary usage in training sets or in the DOGEbags addled little minds. And I seem to recall, possibly not entirely accurately, Republican voter purge software that, faced with more than one (say) “Juan Garcia” (yes, the Spanish name was important), treated all but one as fraudulent registrations.

Dad Joke of the Day: What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta.

“AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they’re faster, study finds” [The Register]. N=16. “Computer scientists with Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR), a non-profit research group, have published a study showing that AI coding tools made software developers slower, despite expectations to the contrary. Not only did the use of AI tools hinder developers, but it led them to hallucinate, much like the AIs have a tendency to do themselves. The developers predicted a 24 percent speedup, but even after the study concluded, they believed AI had helped them complete tasks 20 percent faster when it had actually delayed their work by about that percentage.” After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20 percent,” the study says. “Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19 percent — AI tooling slowed developers down.” The study involved 16 experienced developers who work on large, open source projects. The developers provided a list of real issues (e.g. bug fixes, new features, etc.) they needed to address – 246 in total – and then forecast how long they expected those tasks would take. The issues were randomly assigned to allow or disallow AI tool usage.” • “There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over.”

“When Google’s slop meets webslop, search stops” [Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic]. “[Google AI Overviews] are very, very bad.” Lots of horrifying detail, and this isn’t even the crescendo:

[T]he existence of [Overviews] citations allowed [HouseFresh’s proprietor, Giselle] Navarro to compile statistics about the sources that Google relies on most heavily for information about [air purifier] product quality:

43.1% of these statements come from product manufacturers’ marketing materials;

19.5% of these statements are sourced from pages that contain no information about the product. Much of the remainder comes from the same “site reputation abuse” that Google said it would stop prioritizing two years ago. An alarming amount of this material is also AI generated: this is the “coprophagic AI” problem in which an AI ingests another AI’s output, producing ever-more nonsensical results.

For me, the enraging thing about this is that clean shated air saves lives, so by polluting the air purifier review space, Google is making our enviironment more lethal. The whole article is great, and for those who play the ponies, Doctorow’s crescendo is the logic that Google is hellbent on AI “innovation” to keep its price-to-earnings (PE) ratio at 20:1, “growth stock” territory. “Companies with high PE ratios can use their stock in place of money” and “Google’s status as a growth stock has allowed it to buy its way to dominance.”