A Nobel Wheeze

In a recent The Rest Is Politics Alastair Campbell made a suggesion that I suspect wasn't entirely serious. It seems to me though that it deserves serious consideration.

<RS-style-interruption> 

Habitués of The Rest Is Politics will be familiar with the frequent interruptions made by Rory Stewart when  Alastair Campbell jumps in in medias res (as Rory might put it).

<tangent> 

Stewart doesn't always manage to keep Campbell in check. A recent example of a misinterpretation that he didn't forestall involved a bit of proof-reading jargon. In a recent podcast Alastair Campbell seemed to be talking about someone called 'Elsie Conservative'. He was halfway through the next sentence  before I realized that he had said '(l.c.) conservative'. Until my short spell working at OUP in the early 1980s I hadn't met the abbreviation 'l.c.' (=lower case), and I've never before heard 'small-c conservative' rendered in this way.

</tangent>

This is what Wikipedia says about USAID: 

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was created to provide foreign aid, disaster relief, and economic development.^[4] Established in 1961 during the Cold War by President John F. Kennedy, USAID was designed to counter the Soviet Union through the use of soft power across the world. In 1998, USAID was reorganized by Congress as an independent agency.

With average annual disbursements of about $23 billion from 2001 to 2024, USAID had missions in over 100 countries, in areas as diverse as education, global health, environmental protection, and democratic governance. An estimated 91.8 million deaths, including 30.4 million among children younger than five years old, were likely prevented by USAID funding between 2001 and 2021.... 

On January 24, 2025 President Donald Trump ordered a near-total freeze on all foreign aid.  In February, the administration placed most employees on administrative leave. The absence of authorization from Congress led to lawsuits against the Trump administration.Also in February, the administration made several allegations of wasteful spending and fraud, allegations which were generally reported [HD: sic; many observers would prefer 'found'] to be false.

Several days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for humanitarian aid. However, a key issue developed over whether the waivers for lifesaving aid were actually translating into aid flowing. Despite the waiver, there was still much confusion about what agencies should do. More than 1,000 USAID employees and contractors were fired or furloughed following the near-total freeze on U.S. global assistance that the second Trump  administration implemented.

On January 27, 2025, the agency's official government website was shut down. 

<HD-update> 
Generally I've removed footnote references from that Wikipedia entry, as they wouldn't work  without a lot of recoding. But one footnote points to this Impact Metrics Dashboard (and at time of blogpost, the most recent upate was on 26 June). If, in a Wikipedia-esque sort of way, you think 'NEEDS CITATION', you know where to look.

<inline-ps>
Another footnote cites this report from the National Library of Medicime. whose title says it all:  Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis

</inline-ps> 

</HD-update>

</RS-style-interruption> 

 Alastair Campbell's idea is in two steps:

1. Nominate USAID for the Peace Prize.
2. Invite Trump to receive it on their  behalf, given that they have been disbanded.
   
   
   

I'm afraid that 2 is unlikely to happen, for  diplomatic reasons. Besides, Trump wouldn't accept. But I think the first step is worth considering. The criteria for those qualified to make nominations, according to  the Peace Prize criteria for nominators  include:

• Members of national assemblies and national governments (cabinet members/ministers) of sovereign states as well as current heads of state...

and

University professors, professors emeriti and associate professors of history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology, and religion; university rectors and university directors (or their equivalents)... 

So most citizens of the free world  could ask a member of a national assembly to do it, and any suitably qualified academic could do it. I'm sure there must be dozens of Harvard staff who would happily join in.

It's not uncommon for  the Peace Prize to be awarded to an institution. The only drawback I can see is that the Nobel Committee might invoke the No Posthumous Prizes rule, which I thought had been invented off the cuff by a misogynist to justify the exclusion of Rosalind Franklin from Crick and Watson's prize. And as the earliest date for the award would be 2026 USAID will by then be well and truly defunct.

That's enough for today.

b

Update: 2025.08.26.20:15 – Added <inline-ps />

What do you do with a foot?

I first heard the expression 'step foot' 20 or 30 years ago, when I dismissed it as a one-off mistake; or maybe, as I was working at the time in a US-based company, I imagined it was a feature of American English (AE). But I've been hearing it more and more, and have finally looked at a Google Ngram that compares the two.

The expression 'step foot' made a negligible impression until the early 1990s

<autobiographical-note>
I'm reading at the moment a novel set in the time of Henry (Tom Jones etc.)
Fielding:  

The 'guilty' novel

The 'guilty' novel

It would be ridiculous to expect a modern novelist to write all the dialogue in a historical novel cast in the vernacular of the day; without linguistic anachronisms it would simply be unintelligible. But I don't think I have ever seen this phrase in print, and I had only just seen this Google Ngram (or maybe, now I think of it, the fact of my interest in the expression made me notice somethng I'd been seeing for years but not paying attention to).

Anyway, for whatever reason, I did notice when an eighteenth-century character used a late-twentieth century speech form.
</autobiographical-note>

But that Google Ngram lumps together by default all English appearances of the queried text, from Google Books in general. It is possible though to narrow it down to AE or BE.

<tangent>
...but not Australian English or South African English, or....Besides, what does 'AE' mean? Does it include Canadian English, or ia 'A' just an abbreviation for 'USA'? And besides,  how can a Google Books title refer to any particular geography? Does 'BE' include Indian English and all those other Englishes that publsher's rights contracts refer to as relating to the 'traditional British Commonwealth' (or did when I last had to deal with such things, in the early 1980s)?

So many questions, so little time...
<tangent>

And AE, as usual, takes the lead in the evolition of English:

The 'step foot' line begins to heave itself up off the x-axis as early as the 1980s. By contrast, in BE that line shows no significant sign of life until the mid-late noughties, when in AE it had been growing increasingly strong for 30-odd years. And whereas in AE 'set foot' outnumbers 'step foot' about 10:1 in BE the number is more like 15:1; give it a few years though. 

(I'll never use the arriviste 'step foot', but my grandchildren may. Speaking of which, as I'll be seeing them all tomorrow, there are things I should be getting ready....)

b

 

Infamy at Deef Castle

 MrsK and I began (and decided not to continue with  the other seven parts of ...) The Count of Monte Cristo (the new one on U & Drama) the other night. The Radio Times had praised it for its faithfulness to Dumas' original, but we should have known that 'faithfulness to the original' can (but needn't...

<exception>
(as is demonstrated by the BBC's 1964 version starring Alan Badel...

<autobiographical-note>
{which I remember watching [but not following or sticking  with] as a recently-turned 13-year-old; its mournful theme tune [which in my mind's ear I hear  as featuring a horn solo, though at that age I wouldn't have recognized the instrument, and it may be a figment of my imagination] didn't promise the sort of derring-do that might have held my attention at the time] and the names were all pronounced in a funny way [Badel pronounced his sweetheart à la française – stress on the last syllable – /mɛrse'dɛz/ : this clashed with my own understanding, honed as it was by my recent exposure to I Spy On the Road – I knew how to pronounce Mercedes (odd name for a woman though, I thought at the time)].

</autobiographical-note>

The IMDb page for the 1964 Count of Monte Cristo has many reviews (20 at time of going to press), all of which rate it very highly (and several of them mention faithfulness to the text – although at 12 x 25 mins it's shorter than the new one.)
</exception>

...) can lead to an adaptation that to quote the review in last Sarurday's Times ...

<parenthesis>
(that's The Times, known in some parts of thr world as 'the London Times', but more memorably [at the time of the move from Fleet Street] as 'The Wapping Liar')
</parenthesis>

...is 'clunky'. The characters  are two-dimensional, the plot is advanced not by the action but by the stilted dialogue, and to make suspension of disbelief even  less possible the foreign names are treated to the most ridiculous of San Ferry Ann pronunciations. The Château d'If is a lot less intimidating as the ' Castle d'If'; we should be  grateful, I suppose, that it's not 'Deef Castle'. One of its inmates is promised to be Jeremy Irons, which might make it more watchable; but he didn't appear in episode one so we'll have to give him a miss.

l'Envoi

I usually enjoy The Rest Is Politics (both Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart's original and the US spinoff with Katty Kay and  Anthony ('the Mooch') Scaramucci (more robust than the Beeb's Americast), but recently they've been spoiled for me by the ads for HP, which offer a special TRIP discount. I don't want the discount; as an ex-employee I already get one. Rather than giving out discounts I'd prefer them to treat their older pensioners with a modicum of decency.

<administrative-background general- interest="nugatory">
By a quirk of UK pensions law, Defined Benefit pensions (the good sort, which most people don't get any more), if earned before 1997, are treated differently than pensions earned more recently. While recent pensions are legally required to be kept at a more-or-less steady value by annual increments, pensions earned before 1997 attract  'discretionary' increases (i.e. in practice, courtesy of HP, in the UK [though not in the USA, or anywhere  else for that matter]  more often than not, nothing). As an example, the first ⅔  of my service (1984-1997), earns less (or barely more – life's too short to do the sums – what do you take me for, obsessional?) than the final ⅓ (1098-2004) , because the more recently earned pension has kept pace with inflation while the earlier period's earnings have increased, over more than 20 years, by a single figure percentage.

This is immoral, and I would think barely legal, as it constitutes discrimination on grounds of age. I am far from being on my uppers, but I'm much less well-off than HP pensioners in other parts of the world. So the HP  ads  rankle. Bitter? Moi?                                                               

 <tangent>
If you're really interested in this pre '97 stuff, you could start with this Lexology page

<inline-PS>
For a graphic explanation of this injustice, with particular reference to HP, see here.
</inline-PS

</tangent> 

</administrative-background>

I'm missing the cricket again, so finita la commedia.

b

Update: 2025.08.16.17.40 – Added <inline-PS />

 

 

Of vests and waistcoats rediviva

<inline-pps>
A lot of this post disappeared in a puff of phosphorescence 

<mea-culpa>
'Pilot error'  as engineers used to say when I'd done something silly. Over-enthusistic deletion (and hasty reading of deletion warnings). 
</mea-culpa>

So only the PS survived, until today (31 July 2025).                                               </inline-pps> 

In a recent episode  of The Week in  Westminster a guest referred to Trump playing his cards 'close to his chest', which I felt would have been more appropriate as 'close to his vest'.

<autobiographical-note>
Ever since, in my early teens, I came across a book entitled (sic for Heaven's sake...

<rant frequency="You may have heard this before">
I know acadenics are forced, on pain of non-publication, to use 'titled' when referring to books, because of the ubiquity of American style guides, but the requirements of American English (AmE) (with its cultural background of a society without a peerage) has the luxury of one word assigned to each of two meanings: titled of a book, entitled of a person. British English, however, has three meanings:

• Entitled (in the preppy AmE sense) of a person
• Entitled (in the sense of bearing a title) of a book
• Titled (in the sense of being a member of the peerage) of a person

'Two's into three: I cannot do it' as we used to say in the arithmetic class. So, in BrE we don't have that luxury and simply have to use the two words in three senses.
</rant> 

...). A Vest-Pocket Ready Reckoner, a relic of my mother's (whom saints preserve and they better had) work at Technicolor. 'But vests don't have pockets,' I complained. 'They do in America,' she said; 'over there it means waistcoat.'

So, until my recent reference to corpuses...

<here-be-irregular-plurals>
(and although the  English Corpora site wants me to call them 'corpora' I'm sticking with Fowler – who prefers -s plurals in most cases [a rule that I have added to with this codicil: 'especially when the plural is irregular']).
</here-be-irregular-plurals>

...I believed that the AmE version of 'waistcoat' was always 'vest' 
</autobiographical-note>

Then, in the same week as that The Week in Westminster programme, a prospector in McLevy in the New World used the word 'waistcoat' – leading me to these corpus searches:

As near as makes no odds, the 'chest' and 'vest' versions are about equally common in AmE.

Whereas in BrE there is a clear preference for 'chest':

 

And I suspect these two 'vests' may have an American context.

I turned finally to the Google Ngram Viewer, which makes it (suspiciously? Discuss) easy to compare AmE and BrE usage, and got these results (looking just at the words vest and waistcoat). 'Vest' has always been the more common,  but usually only by a factor of about 5.

Meanwhile in BrE the two are less extremely distributed, but usually only by a factor of about 2 (which, given  that in BrE the words always refer to distinct garments, I find interesting.

<autobiog>
I certainly have experience of a lot more vests than waistcoats, though admittedly waistcoats tend to be more comment-worthy than vests.
</autobiog>

Enough, 

b

Update:2025.06.03.17:50 – Added PS

PS

Typical! There was I talking about AmE usage, and the more I looked into it the wronger I got. COHA shows that 'vest' can be used to mean waistcost in AmE and often does, but 'waistcoat' certainly exists. Until WWII it was relatively common, but since then its appearance has been fairly wan:

Graph showing AE usage of waistcoat

approximately aligned  – on my screen (but YMMV)–

with corpus data

Meanwhile, 'vest' is more than twice  as common:

                          

So 'vest' has been growing in popularity, with some of the increase attributable to its use as a synonym for 'waistcoat'.

Computer says ON

Last December, before Elon Musk started wielding his billion dollar chainsaw, an article in Futurism...              

<parenthesis subject="The link not followed">
( I had, incidentally, published a link to it in an article in The Byte quoted in this:

AI models routinely hallucinate and make up facts. They have no understanding of language, but instead use statistical predictions to generate cogent-sounding text based on the human writing they've ingested 

But I'd made the mistake of leaving a link in that I hadn't followed. Usually I remove any links that I've not followed; it seems to me to be a requirement of responsible blogsmansanship – making sure my blog doesn't lead people astray.) 
</parenthesis>

... pointed out that information seen through the distorting lens of Elon Musk's imagination (EMformation?) might not be entirely reliable: 

The astonishingly gullible billionaire ...

<parenthesis type="silly quip">
(a sequel to The Very Hungry Caterpillar?) 
</parenthesis>

...has a well-documented tendency to spread misinformation, an embarrassing and often dangerous quality that's undermined his standing in the world of science and technology.

In fact, even his own AI company's chatbot Grok — which Musk himself has branded as a brash truth-teller — has a pretty good grasp on the situation.

"Yes, there is substantial evidence and analysis suggesting that Elon Musk has spread misinformation on various topics, including elections, to a very large audience through his social media platform, X," Grok responded when asked if "Elon Musk spread misinformation to billions of people."

Source

 The article goes on:

Grok pointed to the wealth of misinformation Musk has shared in recent years, especially when it comes to the most recent presidential election.

"Musk's posts related to elections, which have contained misleading or false claims, have amassed billions of views," Grok wrote. "Musk has shared manipulated videos and debunked claims about voting processes, including allegations about non-citizen voting, which are common themes in misinformation narratives."

Case in point, less than a day after Musk cosigned a meme that called people who "still believe everything shown in [sic] news" dumb, he shared a video that purportedly showed "armed communist Maduro gangs... storming polling stations in Punta Cardón," Venezuela.

As many users quickly pointed out, the video actually showed thieves attempting to steal air conditioners.

This reminded me...

<parenthesis>
Not sure why. Perhaps it was that the bad uses of AI brought to mind the possible good ones. That's me – always looking on the bright side.
</parenthesis>

... of a recent addition to the The Rest Is Politics: Leading series. To quote that website's description:

How many people are going to die as a result of American support for USAID programs being removed? What are the limits of thinking of AI as the silver bullet for healthcare? How do we bring the doubling of the human lifespan to everyone alive without bankrupting our societies? 

Atul Gawande, late of USAID, and soon to be reinstated as a Professor at Harvard...

<trump-warning>
(that is, if His Royal Mendaciousness...

<inline-ps>
I chose this word to resonate with "Highness", but "mendacity" resonates almost as well with "Majesty" and is much more common, as this Ngram shows:

I wonder what happened in mid-19th century
to  make 'mendacity' so popular. So many
questions, so little time...

</inline-ps>

...Mendacity doesn't have it closed down for the bare-faced effrontery of having been founded before the USA was [and shame on all the other institutions and people [particularly politicians] kowtowing to the infantile/amoral vandal...

<tangent>
[Meanwhile, in Ukraine, where traditional diplomats want 'a just peace' he wants 'just peace' so that he can get on with general exploitation]
</tangent>

...]). As Anthony Scaramucci says in another Goalhanger podcast, we can look forward to "a Golden Age of Corruption'.
 </trump-warning>

... is well worth a listen He talks with wit and wisdom (and, appropriately enough for a surgeon, incision) about not only Trump and his lying hench-nerd (to call Musk a henchman would be an insult to henchmen), but about the uses of AI in medicine. At one point he says that in the average clinic every hour of contact with patients requires two hours' work on documentation. 

Which adds weight to a Medscape survey on the use of AI in medicine, published last September, here

   

Of all the areas considered by respondents (745 UK based doctors), 'Administration and recordkeeping' us seen by doctors as potentially the most promising area  for using AI.

But this doesn't mean much; they might be wrong in that belief; and UK-based doctors may not be the best judges of this anyway; I don't know. Besides, AI may just be the deus ex machina that – in this pipe dream – gets rid of all the pen-pushing.

 Towards the end of the survey report we get to the main event:

That last comment is really GOSH-worthy. And don't you agree that the penultimate word is doing a lot of heavy-lifting?

But, although I can't say I'm  impressed by the survey, the message seems to be that AI can have a big influence on medicine as long as expectations are kept in check. The tech-bros waving their iPhones at Atul Gawande and saying 'This is gonna replace you' are wrong. As he says 'How is it going to deliver [a] baby?'

There's good news: 

 

<tangent>
Oh dear. That "61% vs 47%" is a symptom of the confusion and haste that characterizes this report. They should've used AI – and if they did they should have done a decent job of post-editing.
<tangent>

 Enough. But before I go I must mention the next WCS concert, at All Saints in ... oo-er. less than a month.

b

Update 2025.05.27.13:05 – Added <inline-ps />

Update 2025.06.03.20:40 – Added PPS

PPS 

Some thoughts about that concert:

• Word painting
  Many – if not most – composers make their music reflect the words they are setting. I've referred to this often, passim (which is a fancy way of saying "so often that I can't be bothered to look them all up'; but the word cloud points to a few of the early ones...
  

  <rant>
  (I say 'early' because Blogger updated their tagging software at some time during the early 2020s; I'm not sure precisely when, because after the change I spent a few months limping along  trying to make up for the improvement.
  

  <tangent> 
  I've no reason to doubt that it was an improvement from the coders' point of view and/or from the point of view of the performance of the software. But from the user's point of view it was a great leap backwards.
  </tangent> 

  This sort of change is a recurrent feature of the Strong Message Here podcast. 

  German has a word for it: Verschlimmbesserung.) 

  </rant>

  ...).As an example from our 22 June concert, in Parry's I Was Glad, the words 'Jerusalem was builded as a city that is at unity in itself'. These words have a very complex setting in 8 parts  (two SATB choirs). At first the two choirs are separated by a bar or two. but ultimately the two choirs come together at the word 'itself'. But Mozart goes one step further, with his music reflecting not only the words he is setting, but their spirit. We are singing his Mass in C...
  

  <future-concert>
  (Next  Autumn we will be singing a very different Mass in C, Beethoven's – not only the first piece I ever sang with an SATB choir, but also the first piece I sang with WCS in 1985.)
  </future-concert>

  ... better known (though not to Mozart himself) as The Coronation Mass. Mozart, a devout believer, ends the Credo with an Amen chorus – a typically Mozartian fugue. But afterwards he ends the movement with a simple 'Credo in unum deum, Amen, Amen', as if to say 'This clever-clever stuff is all very well, but here's what matters: I believe in one God. END OF.'
  

• I was glad
  I have sung this many times (with and without the Vivats – and if you want to know what that means, read this extract from an earlier post:

  <prescript>
  

  In Latin, 'May he live" is Vivat, traditionally pronounced – in this context – in what Wikipedia calls 'a variant known as Anglicised Latin' though I'm not convinced about the 'Anglicised' bit. It's the traditional seventeenth to early twentieth century English pronunciation: /vaɪvæt/. This section is officially known as "The Acclamation", less formally known in choral circles as "The Vivats".

  
  

  But more often than not, in concerts, the Vivats are not included, and some listeners (though not singers) are surprised by Parry's abrupt change of mood
  Source (the latest of three posts to this blog on the subject of Parry's setting of the psalm Laetatus sum ('I Was Glad').

  </prescript>

  While the Mozart is known as The Coronation Mass, although the composer himself did not have a particular coronation in mind, 'I Was Glad' was written specifically for a coronation. As I wrote (in the same post to this blog):
  

  <prescript>
  When Hubert Parry set verses from Psalm 122 (Laetatus Sum) for  the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 the text of the middle section read

  Vivat Rex Eduardus

  ...

  Vivat! Vivat! Vivat!

  
  

  It was revised for George VI, for Elizabeth II, and for Charles III ...
  </prescript>
• Geistliches Lied
  
  We (30-40 members of WCS) sang this in our tour of the north-east in the summer of 2016, discussed here. It's a gem, and while sounding simple is incredibly intricate. (The reasons are discussed here (not my work – music theory isn't my thing!) At the end there is what may well be my favourite setting of "Amen"; in it the basses. who have previously been following the alto
  entries, take the lead...
  

  <autobiographical-note>
  ...and end on an Eb. (On a good day I can claim to have a bottom D, but I doubt whether the conductor could hear it, let alone the front row of the audience.)
  </autobiographical-note>

  .

(These are not meant to be anything like exhaustive programme notes – just a few thoughts. There's plenty more in this enjoyable evening of fairly light music, both listed on the poster and TBD (sic!). Don't miss it.)       

But I'm missing the cricket.

b

For The Record

Earlier this week I received the latest copy ('latest' being the 2023-24 edition, celebrating 40 years of 'women at Corpus') of my college's annual  magazine, The Record. I did a quick sum and realized that this meant '40 years of women resident at Corpus'.  

<autobiographical-note>

The reason for my temporary confusion was that when I first dined in Corpus, having arrived in late September 1971 (just before my first term – the Oral exam for foreign languages being held before we'd been exposed to anything like tuition) women were admitted to dine at High Table. (This barefaced assault on the patriarchy was greeted by what Nigel Starmer-Smith might have called 'some ill-mannered hissing'). To mark the occasion there were four courses, and as this was my first experience of Formal Hall, my expectations of my second Hall were rudely dashed.  

I wrote about this (with a paranoid self-justificatory note about the timing of Cambridge terms) here.
</autobiographical-note>

Having skimmed through The Record I was about to put it out of my mind ...

<tangent>
(the role of recycling in this process is a matter for ongoing debate with MrsK)
</tangent>

...when I took a last look at the Old Members section, which passes on bits of information about alumni/-ae, listed by year of matriculation and found that I had nearly missed this:

Excerpt from 'Old Members' section of The Record

The text was vaguely familiar, but in this wordy (linkless) form almost entirely useless. Guiltily I remembered a note I had written two or three years ago, with links to posts with 'Corpus-related content'. I had looked in the 2022-23 edition to see whether my attempt at publicity had borne fruit, and then forgotten it.

But in a blog with well over 500 entries, posted over a dozen years, it would be ridiculous to draw from that entry in The Record the conclusion that the content was always related to Corpus. My subjects are many and various, often relating to language and music. I append an example  by way of a PS (or makeweight) that can safely be ignored by the non Corpuscular.

Anyway I hope Blogger's servers can handle the surge in traffic now that I've included these links:

• Chris Andrew's book (not books)
• Augustine Gospels
• Singing in Chapel
• Marlowe portrait
• Chronopage also here and here
• Wilkins (New Court architect)
• DNA Origami/Rutherford

b

PS

On BBC Radio 4 the other  day...

<correction>
This was in fact more than a year ago. I just left it unfinished and unpublished.
</correction>

 ...in a programme I didn't have time to digest, but will revisit..

<parenthesis>
(I did, but found I had no more to add)
</parenthesis>

...a Spanish-speaking vulcanologist...

 <parenthesis>
(I think they used the Globish volcanologist, but I'm a fan of Latinate derivations...

<glossary>
[volcanoes got their name from Vulcan, and those ignorant Romans didn't know squat about seismology and stuff ]
</glossary>

...at the possible expense of international understanding.)
 </parenthesis>

... talking about an eruption he had seen. And he said 'I couldn't stop to watch [the eruption]'.

His English was good enough for him to use "couldn't", but not good enough to stretch to 'couldn't stop watching' (let alone the idiomatic 'couldn't take my eyes off it').

This reminded me of a picture shared in an ESOL teachers' group on Facebook...

<autobiographical-note>
My biography in The Record doesn't mention the fact that, after the skinflints at HP laid me off a few months short of my 20th year (when they'd have had to fork out for an award), I became a language tacher.
</autobiographical-note>

...discussed here

<pre_script>

[This] recalled for me a diagram (I won't say picture) that I used to use to show the difference between "stop + infinitive' (the right-thinking word in the ESOL world is "to-infinitive")... and "stop + gerund*"):

</pre_script>

Exofarts?

Good old Cambridge. Researchers there have really got their finger on the pulse. Theyve been looking at hycean planets ...

<glossary>

HYCEAN is a porte-manteau of hydrogen and ocean. Wikipedia calls them
"a hypothetical type of planet that features a liquid water ocean underneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere", but the 'hypothetical' is based on a 2023 paper. I admit I haven't been keeping up with the literature....: 

</glossary>

...::

Astronomers have detected the most promising signs yet of a possible biosignature outside the solar system, although they remain cautious.

Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, have detected the chemical fingerprints of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), in the atmosphere of the exoplanet K2-18b, which orbits its star in the habitable zone.

On Earth, DMS and DMDS are only produced by life, primarily microbial life such as marine phytoplankton. While an unknown chemical process may be the source of these molecules in K2-18b’s atmosphere, the results are the strongest evidence yet that life may exist on a planet outside our solar system.

Original paper 

The article goes on:

The observations have reached the ‘three-sigma’ level of statistical significance – meaning there is a 0.3% probability that they occurred by chance. To reach the accepted classification for scientific discovery, the observations would have to cross the five-sigma threshold, meaning there would be below a 0.00006% probability they occurred by chance.

Well I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and turn a blind eye to that < .001% chance that they've got it wrong. But K2-18b is 124 light years away. In other words, a few years after my great grandfather Donald celebrated the birth of his son Archibald, the light that we see today from K2 (which I thought was a mountain anyway) had just set off.

Given that K2-18b is an exoplanet (a planet orbiting a star other than the sun) and the chemicals mentioned ("dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS)") are on Earth produced only by life, the exact provenance of these exofarts doesn't really bother me anyway.

And finally

I've noticed of late that something's been happening to "it's your fault", especially during the 21st century. I suppose it's down to the growing unfashionability of the idea of "fault": all this judgmental stuff isn't really politically correct. 

This Ngram from Google Books shows that in the year 2000 "it's your fault" was more than 12 times more common than "it's on you" and "it's down to you" combined, but by 2021 it was less than 7 times more common than combined sightings of the millennial arrivistes – still a good deal more common, but not nearly as much. 

That's all she wrote.

b