A very good year

The year 1951 is notable for three reasons:

1. Michael Rennie starred as Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still
   

   <parenthesis>
   (which featured an early appearance  of an autonomous bot: in the last reel, Klaatu issues a four-word command to the robot Gort, who [or which?] spends the next 10 minutes doing all sorts of clever stuff. Four words! And the first of the four is 'Gort' – the 'wake-up' word, like 'Siri' or 'Alexa'.
   </parenthesis>

2.  My choir was founded.
   

   

   You've just missed this (it was last night, as I type)
   but you're welcome to join us on any Thursday.
   
   

   
   
   


3. I was founded (or, to use the more usual verb, born) as recounted here.

Our first concert in this anniversary year is at our usual home, the lovely All Saints, Wokingham, on 7 November at 7.30, featuring the rarely-performed gem, Stanford's Mass in G (with the generous support of the Stanford Society).

The programme also includes Rutter's setting of the Magnificat.  John Rutter is often referred to as 'Mr Christmas'. And although there is nothing particularly Christmassy about the prayer (except that it is often mentioned at the beginning of the Christmas story) in this setting Rutter breaks up the well-known prayer...

<autobiographical note>
which I have sung in many settings, starting in 1971 – or maybe 1972 but certainly no later, as after my first year I was de-choired (dechorated?) for lack of sight-reading – with Stanford's in Bb, giving the concert a pleasing balance in my mind.
</autobiographical note>

... with the Middle English Christmas Carol Of a rose, a lovely Rose. 

<tangent subject="Unfamiliar words">
If you follow that link, you will find a very obscure (uncompromisingly scholarly) text.  But the OUP text has been sensitively modernized, so that only one word, 'bote', needs a footnote. Like all such one-word 'translations' it doesn't satisfy the pedant in me...

<meta-tangent >
The  Legal section of The Free Dictionary (best I can do without paying to get past the OED's paywall, and don't get me started on that –  Dominus illuminatio mea, harumph) defines it as 'A recompense, satisfaction, amends, profit or advantage : hence came the word man-bote, denoting a compensation for a man slain; house-bote, cart-bote, plough-bote, signify that a tenant is privileged to cut wood for these uses'   

Another free source says of its etymology '

Learned borrowing from Middle English bōte (“advantage, benefit, profit; relief, salvation; atonement, amends, expiation; cure”), from Old English bōt (“help, relief, advantage, remedy; compensation for an injury or wrong; (peace) offering, recompense, amends, atonement, reformation, penance, repentance”)...

It's tempting  – but probably naïve (as I know next to nothing about the pronunciation of Middle English) –  to surmise that its use in a Christian context was influenced by a punning coincidence with Noah's Ark and the many other boats (mostly on the Sea if Galilee as  I recall from a godlier youth) mentioned in the bible stories.

<meta-tangent>

...,  but it'll do!     

<tangent>   

Anyway, don't miss the concert.

b 

PS Whenever I sing a Magnificat in Latin I'm struck by the frequent confusion between the words exultare and exaltare...

<inline__pps>
The one with an a is a transitive verb meanig 'raise up/move to a higher level'; the Latin exaltavit is what the Lord has done – moved her to a higher level. The one with a u is intransitive, and means 'be joyful'; the Latin exultavit is what her spirit has done –  been joyful. 

<heckle>
Same thing! In a metaphorical sense, someone who's joyful has been 'moved to a higher level'
</heckle> 

<response>
Stretching a point, rather, don't you think? 
</response>

Conceivably the poet who wrote the prayer was playing with this metaphorical near-miss. But the two words are really quite distinct.
</inline__pps>

 ... The meanings are very different but the pronunciations are often confused, as I discussed here: My Soul Doth Magnify the Problem

Update:  2026.09.14.16.35 – Added <inline_pps />

.                                                       

Dolphins, Pythons, and Belly-buttons

Things came together the other day, as I listened to Natalie Haynes standing up for Delphi (which presumably had something to with dolphins, I thought).

<stay-tuned>
That's the second thing; Hold your horses – I'm coming to that.  First of all there was Pythian.

</stay-tuned>

Etymonline entry for Python

I had long wondered – though never intensely enough to do anything about it – why people who lived in Delphi were called 'Pythian'.  The thing is, as a Wikipedia article explains, the place originally took its name from its foundation myth, in which Apollo slew a dragon (or serpent – there were no reliable eye-witnesses at the time):

In Greek mythology, Python (Ancient Greek: Πύθων; gen. Πύθωνος) was the serpent, sometimes represented as a medieval-style dragon, living at the center of the Earth, believed by the ancient Greeks to be at Delphi. He was killed by the god Apollo.

...Python, sometimes written Pytho, presided at the Delphic oracle, which existed in the cult center for its mother, Gaia, "Earth" ... Greeks considered the site to be the center of the Earth, represented by a stone, the omphalos or navel, which Python guarded.

Python became ... enemy of the later Olympian deity Apollo, who slew it and took over Python's former home and oracle.... Like many monsters, Python was known as Gaia's son. In turn, Apollo had to eliminate him before he could establish a temple in Delphi.

So the Pythians lived in  Delphi before it was Delphi, and the sacred place was renamed after Apollo bagsied it by killing the child of the previous dedicatee, Gaia. But why Delphi exactly amd what's it got to do with dolphins?

Well, it's all quite simple really. After killing the dragon/serpent Apollo stood awhile ('in uffish thought', probably) and wondered where to get priests for his new shrine:

Delphi was in fact Apollo's chosen land. Soon after his victory over the serpent Python he built an altar in harsh Pvtho. in the midst of a sacred grove. The place was deserted and Apollo was wondering where he would find priests for his new cult when he perceived in the distance on the dark sea a ship manned by some Cretans. Immediately assuming the form of a dolphin,...                                                                          

<parenthesis>
The choice of sea mammal was not entirely fortuitous. Wikipedia says:

In Greek myths, dolphins were seen invariably as helpers of humankind. Dolphins also seem to have been important to the Minoans,...

<tangent author="HD">
You've no doubt been wondering about the acuity of Apollo's eyesight. This Minoan angle explains why – seeing that the sailors were Cretans – Apollo chose the form of a dolphin.
</tangent>

...judging by artistic evidence from the ruined palace at Knossos.... Dolphins are common in Greek mythology, and many coins from Ancient Greece have been found which feature a man, a boy or a deity riding on the back of a dolphin....The Ancient Greeks welcomed dolphins; spotting dolphins riding in a ship's wake was considered a good omen.

</parenthesis>          

...he sped after the ship and leapt on to the deck, to the great terror of the sailors, who were even more terrified when their ship suddenly ceased to obey the oars and, deviating from its course, rounded the Peloponnese, entered the Gulf of Corinth and ran aground on the shores of Crissa. Apollo then reassumed his his [sic]...

<tangent subject="1963 printing technology">
The type for this book was set in the days when people made decisions about line-breaks, and a 'loose' line (one with large spaces between the words) followed a line that ended with  'his'. The typesetter fixed this by starting the following line with a rogue 'his', thinking that no one would notice. Well he should think again – although I must admit I missed it on a first reading and only noticed it when proof-reading an OCR transcript that had different line-breaks.
</tangent>

...divine appearance and told the Cretans his will. 'From now on none of you will again return to your pleasant city. You will see your rich dwellings and your cherished wives no more; but you will guard my temple. You will know the designs of the immortal gods and, by their will, you will be perpetually honoured. You will have in abundance all that the illustrious tribes of men bring to me. And since you first beheld me on the dark sea in the shape of a dolphin, you shall invoke me by the name of the Delphinian.'                                                                                                                  

  New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology

Now we come to the belly-button. What the serpent/dragon was doing to attract Apollo's herpeticidal...

<AI_schmAI>
Google's AI Overview says of my new-coined word (not quite new-coined – there is a rarely used medical term that means 'killing herpes') 'it playfully or erroneously refers to the killing of reptiles or snakes'. Well all I can say to that is PSHAW.                                     </AI_schmAI>

...attentions was guarding the Omphalos – the Earth's navel (and who could object to Gaia's wanting to protect that?). This reminded me etymologically (how else?) of this:

<autobiographical-note date="1972">

In my first year of Spanish...

<old-news type="?">
I may have said before why I had to take up Spanish after leaving school. I'd studied French to A-Level, and started German in the Lower VI^th (or Year 12 as I gather they're calling it nowadays). But Cambridge decreed that – as French and German were so popular as choices for their two-languages course...

<tangent>
On reflection I prefer the requirement (applied I think, by the University of York at the time [or maybe it was Lancaster _{[but another indent would make this unreadable]} for one European or Slavic language and one completely unrelated one. 

</tangent> 

So I had to take up another. For social reasons (cherchez la femme, or in this case busca la chica) I chose Spanish. 

</old-news>

... I sat a translation exam discussing a scholarly debate about whether Adam had a navel. At that stage I didn't know the Spanish for navel (derived from the Greek omphalos – Spanish ombligo). Undeterred, I got by with a bit of scholarly periphrasis: cuerda umbilical.
</autobiographical-note>

Is that the time? Guitar practice calls. 

b

Zidane, you're rocking the boat

 (He hasn't yet, but when he does – and he's not the most equanimous of ex-footballers, so give him time – there's a ready made bon mot. You're welcome.) 

Earlier this week, listening to the latest The Rest is Politics, I had the satisfaction of foreseeing a reference to a bit of old news (vintage 2004).

<autobiographical-note>
In September 2004, retraining as a teacher...

<tangent>
(because the skinflints* at HP had got rid of me a few months before they'd've had to shell out for my 20 years' service award)

* You heard, skinflints. They are among the very few companies who choose not to index-link pre-1999 pensions. As a result the pension accruing from the first ⅔ of my service is a minuscule fraction of what I get for the last ⅓. For a longer whinge about this, see the last screenful of this, and for a fuller analysis of my erstwhile employer's penny-pinching skulduggery see here (a YouTube channel run by the HPPA).
</tangent>

... I was expected to have read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested everything the then education minister did (and in some cases ignored). In this case what Ruth Kelly ignored was the report on the future of education, commissioned by one of her predecessors.
</autobiographical-note>

In a comment about his hopes for the Burnham government...

<tangent.
On Burnham's first day in office, incidentally, the  BBC Radio 4's 6 o'clock news started as usual with a number of headlines, and then continued 'Returning to our st... top story'. A close shave. It would have done nothing for the Beeb's alleged lefty leanings if the newsreader had persisted in the Spoonerism and greeted the arrival of a proper socialist in No 10 with the words

 'stop Tory'.

</tangent>

...Alastair Campbell said he hoped Burham's new education minister would dust off and update (of course – for one thing it was pre-AI) 'a 22 year-old report' about the future of education. Aha, I thought, Tomlinson.

The report was truly radical. Wikipedia's summary lists these key proposals:

• Provide courses which stretch children.
• Ensure that children have basic literacy and numeracy skills.
• Raise the status of vocational qualifications.
• Reduce the amount of assessment and the number of exams.
• Simplify the system - make it easier to carry over achievements from one course of study to the next.
• 14–19 diploma to replace GCSEs, A- and AS-Levels, BTECs and AVCEs.

 But as Campbell said in that podcast, the Labour government were running out of steam, and the environment (and 'events, dear boy') were not such as might favour the upturning of so many vested interests, nor at such expense. The proposals were watered down ....

<parenthesis>
(Ruth Kelly's fanfare must take the biscuit for mealy-mouthed timidity:

"For the first time we are going to take on and tackle the intellectual snobbery which has relegated vocational education to a second class, second best education," said Education Secretary Ruth Kelly, as she prepared to publish a White Paper responding to the Tomlinson report.

 )
</parenthesis>

...and surfaced, almost unrecognizably, as a bit of tinkering (Wikipedia again):

The Government's response, led by newly appointed (December 2004) Secretary of State Ruth Kelly, was to largely reject these proposals. Most notably absent from the government's white paper was the Working Group's suggestion for an overarching diploma system. In the run up to a General Election, and in the face of strong resistance from the Confederation of British Industry, they chose to reform existing qualifications by making them harder, and more clearly tied to basic skills.

Tomlinson dismissed this at the time as a missed chance. Meanwhile NEETs mount up (another TRIP+ podcast has one such saying that she would prefer 'LEETs' – LOOKING for Employment Education or Training.

L'Envoi 

Resurrecting an occasional feature of this blog, here is a report on The State of the <thing>, of which this post is the 600^th . In recent months visitors to the blog ('page views', as reported by Blogger) have increased in a near Trump-ian way (more than ever before):

That spike last September was the record, more than in the heyday of Harmless Drudgery (when the progress of dictionary work justified the reference to Samuel Johnson: 

'Lexicographer: a harmless drudge'

) And the most recent 12 months have included all 6 of the peaks greater than 20,000.

Not an overnight success; over-decade, perhaps.

b

This is what a T-shirt looks like

A quickie before  I head West in search of coolth.

If I didn't have graphics turned off by default I'd have missed this bit of casual sexism in a bit of mail I  just received (in connection with a maintenance contract):

Before this mail was sent, some early reviewer – I presume – pointed out that this was an offensive (and out-dated) cliché, and the graphic was changed (hastily, so it's a fairly generic bit of clip-art):

But in their haste, the coder of this bit of HTML didn't update the Alternate text, which (in the words of the indispensable index DOT Html} has these attributes:

Standards Details: In all HTML 4.x/XHTML DTDs

Required? Yes

Description:
This is text to be displayed in place of an image for browsers that can not handle this ability or for browsers that have disabled this ability.

Values: CDATA.

Note the second line; it is required. So if a coder is going to change an <IMG> tag's Src (the attribute that says where the source is), they'd better change the Alternate text too. Otherwise there'll be egg on someone's face (as in the case of this fossilized sexism – it's not visible on the surface, but in the right light... oops)

b

Magnifica Humanitas

The point de départ for today's offering is this selection of quotes from Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical:

• “A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.” 
  
  

• “Indifference to the truth leads, slowly but surely, to a descent into totalitarianism. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, the ideal subjects of such regimes are not so much  who are ideologically convinced, but rather “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
  
  

• “Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the “just war” theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated. Humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.”
  
  

• “Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon…
  

  <AC-elision>
  This elision is made in the original selection. But I think the original reference to the mega-rich entrepre-nerds is worth repeating.
  

  ...phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today...

  He's a good man, our Leo. 

  </AC-elision>

  ...Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.”
  
  

• “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”

The selection was made by Alastair Campbell, who famously 'doesn't do God', which accounts for His (sic) absence from the chosen text. The encyclical itself (which Campbell recommended in a recent-ish The Rest Is Politics) contains 97 references to 'God' (not counting a further 2 in the contents). So this selection is quite impressive: I would be hard-pressed to choose so many God-free words from such a God-rich document

L'Envoi 

I know that AI and spellcheckers aren't the same thing, but giving the computer more initiative than it deserves is a temptation common to both. And it's at least possible that an AI agent generated this bit of spam and called on a spellchecker in the process:

You won't be surprised to learn that the mail with this header went straight to the bin, so I don't know what largesse I've missed out on, but as with John Collier – who I remember accusing (in my long distant clothes-buying days) of 'catering only for fat dwarves' – I don't think I've missed much

There's more to come on this subject, but that's enough for now.

b

The Sapiens and the cow

In a fairly recent ...

<tangent>
OK, 17 September. There comes a time in the mid-seventies when recentness becomes a somewhat flexible measure

</tangent>

...(members only – so here's a link that will no doubt invite disbursement of some kind, if it works at all) extra edition of The Rest Is Politics Plus, which has a conversation with Rory Stewart  about (you guessed it) AI (the man's obsessed), Yuval Noah Harari discusses a consequence of the break-neck unregulated development of AI. In a clear-headed and unsensational vision of the future, ignoring for the time being the possibility of malign  intervention and mass extermination, he says that – in a world where the entrepre-nerds have a high enough Inanity Quotient  to let AI achieve Recursive Self Improvement (AIs making the next generation of AI's ever further from human understanding or control) – 'We'll be like the other animals on the planet'. He imagines a conversation with a cow.

<parable verbatim="no, but I think I got the gist", embellishment="What do you think?"> 

'You [the cow] are part of a world economic system involving markets in stocks and bonds operated by algorithms that are far beyond your knowledge or control.' 

The cow says 'What are stocks? What are bonds? I know what grass is; I know what fences are; I know that man looks after me and exercises some kind of mastery over me and my kind.'

Comes a time when market conditions change and the supra-national conglomerate that owns the cow goes bust. You tell the cow 'This is the end of the road.' 

'Aha,' thinks the cow, 'I know what a road is – those hard bits of land that are uncomfortable to wal...'.  And the abbattoir's van pulls up.

</parable>

Just over a year ago, The Pimlico Journal published a thought-provoking article:

<j'accuse>

MPs are almost certainly [HD: that is, absolutely certainly – look at the figure It's just hard to prove,] using ChatGPT to generate Commons speeches

A statistical analysis, and some tell-tale signs

Pimlico Journal

Sep 01, 2025

...

I. The statistical evidence for believing that MPs are regularly using ChatGPT to generate Commons speeches

...

What would be far more egregious and alarming [HD: than the use of ChatGPT for constuency work, as defended here by Mike Reader, MP] is the use of AI to write parliamentary speeches. Zoe Crowther of PoliticsHome posted a chart showing a recent spike in the frequency of the phrase ‘I rise to speak’ in Hansard after being tipped off by Reader  that this is a tell-tale sign of ChatGPT.

This spurred further debate, with The Times publishing an editorial on Friday with a similar view to my own: sometimes acceptable if responding to emails, not so much if being used in Parliament. The editorial ended with the question: ‘What cruel news channel will it be that splices together examples of this synthetic oratory?’

Pimlico Journal is not a news channel, but we hope to be able to rise to this challenge nonetheless. In order to do so, we will start by looking for further statistical indications that AI is being used to generate speeches in Parliament. After all, ‘I rise to speak’ is just one phrase, and with a large crop of fresh MPs, it is not outside the realms of possibility that the phrase just caught on through a sort of social contagion because newcomers thought it was somehow ‘the done thing’.

...

The following search terms were sourced by browsing articles and online discussions on what words and phrases AI-generated text overuses, as well as my own experience (some of these words, despite often being cited as disproportionately frequent in AI-generated text, have been excluded for reasons that are listed in ...

<HTTPS: 7, HD:0>
Sorry. I tried to put a link here, but the Substack site involved me in a Kafka-esque verification loop that even I grew tired of.
</HTTPS: 7, HD:0>

...Appendix A). Below, you’ll find a series of graphs showing ... the frequency of AI-associated words and phrases, as well as some reference words, in the House of Commons each year from 2007 to 2025. The frequencies of the word or phrase in each year were adjusted by a factor (Appendix B)...

<HTTPS: 7, HD:0 ALT="Ditto" />

... that attempted to measure how many words were spoken in total in Parliament in that year: for instance, 2025 is adjusted upwards because there have been fewer words spoken in the eight months of the year so far compared to most full years.

<glossary>
The Z-score is a measure of how far a value in a set is from the mean, expressed in units of the standard deviation. And if you know what that means...

<glossary>

</j'accuse>

So this thing is here and is already worming its way into our culture. And I can't help thinking that homo sapiens is the cow in Yuval Noah Harari's parable, driven to extinction by a super-inelligent AI with RSI, just as all the other homo species were driven to extinction by the (possibly well-intemtioned) spread of homo sapiens.

This illustration from The Language Puzzle sprang to mind.
I'm afraid my screen-grab cut off

Ardipithecus ramidus's chin

[no, this isn't Ardipithecus ramidus agnathus]

L'Envoi

That illustration came to mind as a result of an experiment I've been doing for the past year, putting Audible through its paces; in particular I wanted to see how useful Audible was as 'background music' to reading (my eyesight being less than perfect).

I wrote a review, 'published' within Audible...

<air-quotes>
You may see from my review that the Audible app seems ro me to be lashed together with chewing gum and baler twine, so published in this case seems not to mean 'made available as a publication'.
</air-quotes>

Here it is; blest if I can find it in Audible.

<review justification="I SHALL get it read somewhere>

I wish Audible would wait until their readers could read the actual printed book as published; not doing this is a disservice to the authors and also to the listeners  - who get a distorted view of what the author actually meant. I first noticed this in The Book of Why, which I listened to while scanning the printed text. There were numerous cases where the reader changed the written words (usually in ways that had little or no effect on the meaning - for example,  'and so on' for 'etc', 'which' for 'that'). More serious, as the reader had a final page proof, often a piece of text - when the author had added or removed, or reworded something - was omitted or added or unreworded.

In the case of The Language Puzzle this was more obvious to me as I studied Linguistics at degree and post-graduate level, with the added awareness that I knew how linguists speak about things - so that I was (often painfully!) aware of little infelicities. For example, the reader, when the Frenchman was first mentioned, treated the name Brocas to a lavishly Gallic pronunciation; later, presumably after clarification from the author, he used the more Anglophone rendering used by linguists. There were lots of other small points, which though trivial didn't inspire confidence; for example,his stress on homo habilis  varied - starting with homo habilis (the normal stress used by archaeologists, such as Prof. Alice Roberts - quoted on the book's jacket) but settling down on homo habilis (which I'd never heard before)

But the main problem was that at the page-proof stage there had been a full-scale reorganization and the 16-chapter book became a 19-chapter recording, with the three extra chapters cobbled together out of bits of formerly longer chapters. At the beginning there is a breakdown of the argument to come: ' Chapter n deals with <thing>, Chapter n+1 deals with <other-thing>... etc.', and this is a bitty mess (quite hard to follow, as it has to make reference to all the disparate cobbled-together bits). But in the final chapter there is a similar resumé which  is suspiciously unbitty. I didn't check the references, but it feels as though the reorganization escaped the editor's notice. In short, the table of contents is a work of fiction.

The reader had a sing-song voice - not monotonous, but perhaps oligotonous (involving a small number of tones - which he assigned more or less at random throughout each sentence).

My score for 'story' refers to the argument - which I found unconvincing. Of one writer he wrote 'this seems to me a speculation too far' - a criticism that I often felt applied to his own surmises. For example, 'a biface hand-axe could be carried around and used when needed,, just like words' (not verbatim, but that was what he was suggesting); or a chimp's grunts show the beginnings of syntax - which is true, but only in a metaphorical sense. And his frequent resort to synaesthesia as an 'explanation' struck me as fanciful (bordering on risible).

My down-marking for 'Story' was only slightly mitigated by the fact that the sources used were so eclectic and interesting (although the conclusions drawn were so extravagant); I say 'only slightly' because the Audible version doesn't include the footnotes (or perhaps does include them somewhere not pointed to by the lamentable table of contents.

Listen to this book if you want glimpses of an impressive range of archaeological and ethnological and biological and genetic …(etc) findings, though I'm not sure this book adds much to an understanding of the development of natural language.

</review>

Enough!

b 

Aught to know better

 A few years ago I wrote (here) about "for aught I know". And I'd been chewing away at this piece of gristle for some years before that: in my 2014 book When Vowels Get Together V5.2 I wrote  this, in a note about words that use the spelling -augh-:

<prescript> 

(... the less common words aught and fraught [are] not included in the main /ɔ:/ section, as even the most advanced student is unlikely to need these. They might very occasionally meet them, but chiefly in the idioms 'for aught I know' and 'fraught with difficulty/problems/ danger...'. Even then, in the first of these the archaic 'aught' – meaning 'anything'...

 <2026-correction>
(or 'nothing'[cp Mr Micawber's 'twenty pounds, ought and sixpence']; I was led astray by the initial a)
 </2026-correction>

... – is often replaced by 'all'; the British National Corpus lists 55 instances of  'for all I know', but only 2 for the earlier form.)

<correction date-"2026">
In fact the words 'not included in the main /ɔ:/ section' are wrong there. But although I've known about the mistake for some time I haven't been able to correct it – for various reasons having to do with operating systems and reverse compatibility; don't ask. TBH, as we hip-cats say, I don't remember the details.
</correction>

</prescript> 

My latest foray into this bit of linguistic archaeology is to compare the fortunes of the two phrases "for aught I know" and "for all I know" using the Google Books Ngrams Viewer:

A tale of two fortunes

In the mid-nineteenth century the version with 'aught' was 5 or 6 times more common than the version with 'all'. Shortly after the turn of that century the two were equally common. Almost immediately "for all I know" established a healthy lead, staying at 3 or 4 times as common as its rival, until the turn of the twentieth century, when it suddenly shot up, increasing its lead to 7 or 8 times. In another few years, the 'aught' version will exist only in the speech of a dwindling few old fogeys and in historical texts.

What's the reason for this change? Part of the answer, as it applies to the USA, is here (quoting from my 2022 post):

<prescript>

The Department of  Security's Yearbook of Immigration Statistic 2012  shows this pattern of immigration since 1820 [HD: 2026 when that Google Books Ngrams Viewer graph picks up the story]...: 

It's not difficult to imagine what was going on in the mind of the ESOL speaker: they hear a first-language  English speaker saying 'for aught I know'. The second syllable is a word they don't know (or think they may have misheard) starting with the vowel /ɔ:/, so when they reproduce the phrase they use the 'all' version. 

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But what caused the steep rise in the 'all' usage noted in the Ngrams chart  in the first quarter of this century? I have no (mature) idea, although I suspect computers are involved in some way. 'FFS' as they used to say in the OSI standards world when something needed further study.

And another thing: the story with 'for aught I care' and 'for all I care' is very different (but with a similar recent steep rise for the 'all' version): 

Curiouser and curiouser.

Time to return to the madding crowd.

b