AI - mightier than the sword?

Distinguished linguist Professor Naomi Baron, whose new book Who Wrote This? How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing is 'under contract' (which could mean anything...

<autobiographical-note>

In my brief time editing at Macdonald & Co. (soon, when I arrived, to become part of Robert Maxwell's ill-starred empire BPCC), I inherited dozens of titles that had been under contract (and repeatedly not delivered) for years. My chief responsibility, I soon realized, was to cancel them; I didn't last long.

</autobiographical-note>

...but I look forward to the book's apperarance).

In the meantime she has written about ChatGPT. an article whose discovery is an example of the chief reason for my contuing to maintain a very modest presence on Twitter as @leBobEnchainé; it lets you get to hear about interesting stuff that's in the pipeline.

Tools like ChatGPT are only the latest in a progression of AI programs for editing or generating text. In fact, the potential for AI undermining both writing skills and motivation to do your own composing has been decades in the making.

The academic world was intially fearful about tools like ChatGPT on the grounds that they would make cheating easier to do and harder to detect. But the possibilities are much more serious and far-reaching than that. She goes on:

In literate societies, writing has long been recognized as a way to help people think. Many people have quoted author Flannery O’Connor’s comment that “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” A host of other accomplished writers, from William Faulkner to Joan Didion, have also voiced this sentiment. If AI text generation does our writing for us, we diminish opportunities to think out problems for ourselves.

One eerie consequence of using programs like ChatGPT to generate language is that the text is grammatically perfect. A finished product. It turns out that lack of errors is a sign that AI, not a human, probably wrote the words, since even accomplished writers and editors make mistakes. Human writing is a process. We question what we originally wrote, we rewrite, or sometimes start over entirely.

This seems to be serious; and possibly it is. But some years back I wrote about the advent of desktop publishing and my kneejerk reaction against it, and then on mature reflection my growing sense that – although uncomfortable for the publishing industry – it was probably a Good Thing. I'm not convinced in the case of AI, but I am aware that when new technology changes things, people with a vested interest in the past oppose it – often by pointing at what we're losing; what they ignore is what is to be gained by the change. So I'm not going to rush to judgment (and yes, spellchecker, I do spell it that way).

<autobiographical-note>
Somewhere in Knowles Towers there is a copy of an unpublished article that I wrote - many years pre-blog - about how authors writing on computers meant that users of libraries bequeathed literary archives would no longer be able to piece together the genesis of a literary work, with substitutions and crossings out and reorganizations.
</autobiographical-note>

The naming of characters 

Just reporting an aperçu here. I was watching the new Pinocchio over Christmas (or rather the first 10 minutes; Oscar? Can't see what all the fuss is about). And as a result found that the eponymous wooden boy was named after the tree that his 'father' cut down; it was a pine tree – un pino.

<parenthesis>
And I suppose the creation of the name may have been influenced by one of the church-goers who reacted against the graven image ('... or the likeness of anything, either in the heavens above or the Earth beneath' as we used to say in RC circles). She used the term malocchio (='evil eye'). But I don't know whether this was a later addition by Guillermo...

<autobiographical-note>
The older of my brothers – in his mid-teens when I was learning to talk – was sensitive about being addressed with a name that sounded ( in my version of 'William') like 'women'. He had recently had a holiday in Spain, and knew the word Guillermo. So he tried to get me to use that instead. Until I could get my tongue around 'William'  I called him 'Gammo'.
</autobiographical-note>

...del Toro's scriptwriter. 
</parenthesis>

If he had been made from a balsa tree, he might've been called "Balsacchio", which might be thought to be a bit near the knuckle.

Word-watch

I met a new word earlier this week: alexithymia (which loosely translates to “no words for emotion” ' as Wikipedia puts it [I wonder who was the subject of that conversation]. As I usually do with words new to me, I tried to break it down into bits of words already familiar to me. The a- (as in 'aphasia') was obvious enough, and the -lexi- (as in 'dyslexia'). But what about the -thym-?

This is where a distant memory came to my rescue. In the 1950s, when advertising copy writers had a classical education,  household products had names with a classical pedigree like Vim (strength), Lux  (light), or Bovril (beef). There was a brand of toothpaste whose name  seemed strange to me when my family used to use it. 

Some of these products have survived more or less unchanged, and  Euthymol is one (with a reassuringly archaic design). And at last all is clear: eu- as in 'eulogy',' euthanasia', 'eucharist'...; -thym-' as in ... ALEXITHYMIA. It's all about feeling well. Whoever thought of that must have been very proud of themselves, but I don't imagine many of the product's users know or care.

L'envoi

And, in re HMRC and the tax dispute, I'm sick of people sanctimoniously trotting out that thing about the age-old British principle of 'Innocent until proven guilty'. That's about criminal proceedings, and we're not there (yet?). A decent person would have stood down pending investigation. Never mind 'Innocent until proven guilty'. What about 'Decent until proven duplicitous'?

Things to do.

b

Net Contribution to the Age-appropriate Supply of Housing...

... or  NCASH.

The sadly-limited range ....

<autobiographical-note type="I can remember when all this was fields">
When I moved out of London nearly 40 years ago Spencers Wood was semi-rural.  Now it's almost exclusively urban – with few of the benefits of a largely green environment combined with the drawbacks of nose-to-tail traffic,  precious few buses, and a dearth of social and commercial infrastructure.
</autobiographical-note>

...of walks in my vicinity  include routes through two housing estates (well several, actually, but two of relevance here) , one developed in the 1970-'80s and one developed more recently (and still they come). The older one has a fair few bungalows; in fact it has a range of building types. The newer one is a mono-culture suitable for families (young and established) with a few flats for young professionals. Nothing suitable for older people; I shudder to think what it'll be like in 50 years.

An article in the latest edition of Third Age Matters mourns the lack  of suitable new housing for the less spritely:

...Third Agers often feel that suitable smaller housing is not available. The much maligned bungalow is still the housing of choice for many older people as they usually have all the facilities of a house, including private garden and off-road parking, but with the additional benefit of single-level living. But they are in short supply.

It goes on to discuss the reasons for this, which all boil down to one thing: the planning system is seriously flawed. It is based on a single-minded, short-term,, simplistic metric: occupancy per hectare . The only way to get more people onto each hectare is to build upwards. So older people can't buy new  properties –  except in purpose-built ghettoes...

<old-joke> 

Some wag doctored a road sign marking Dover for the Continent and Eastbourne. The additional words were for the incontinent.

</old-joke>

... – either these, or sheltered housing/assisted living/...<insert-euphemism-here>.

Meanwhile, older householders are rattling around in multi-storey houses that they can't maintain and want to move out of; as that article says:                        

Press reports have highlighted the massive amount of housing space tied up by pensioners, often living alone in four-bedroom houses. A report from Legal & General estimated some 7.5 million rooms could be available if the occupiers were to downsize to smaller accommodation.

But old people need to live with young people, and vice versa. My family home in the '60s-'70s was a sort of informal youth club, open all hours, to the benefit of all involved whatever their age.

<modest-proposal comment="This is my theory, and it is mine. Ahem.">
To ensure a healthy mixture of young and old in new housing estates (which will not be new for long, and  they need to continue to house a mentally healthy population) occupancy standards need to be changed to take into account the net effect of new developments. If a developer can arrange for an old householder to buy a bungalow, they should be able to factor that person's property into their calculations: planning standards must be based on NCASH.
</modest-proposal>

And fonally ...

<sic> 

This isn't a typo, or rather it was a typo in 1972 in a script I contributed to a review called 'How Big Were Luther's Theses?' – but ever since then whenever I think 'And finally' my private monologue misreads it.

</sic>

...

My habitual equanimity is frequently disturbed in the last few weeks by the TV trailer for the new series of  Waterloo Road, which has a voiceover saying 'At Waterloo Road we pride ourselves in (sic)...'.

At this stage I lose focus, and can't take in what they're proud about, because in my world you 'pride yourself on something'. I suspected when I first heard this that there had been interference –  or crosstalk –

<autobiographical-note>
'Crosstalk' is a bit of jargon I came across when my middle brother (RIP) was an apprentice at DECCA. In a vinyl record, the interference between one groove and its neighbouring groove is crosstalk. Come to think of it, it's not a very  illuminating metaphor; it's just a memory that   occurred to me, and I thought I might as well clutter your minds up with it too.
</autobiographical-note>

... from the expression 'take pride in', which just happens to inhabit the same semantic area (although not being a synonym). And having thought this, I felt I should put some numbers on it. Here they are, based on two corpuses (or corpora if you must   –  ...

<autobiographical-note>
I've been suspicious of $10 words like that ever since a GP diagnosed my unexplained slight temperatures (in boyhood) as 'PUO'. 'PUO' stands for Pyrexia of Unknown Origin, or in other words 'he has a temperature and I don't know why'.
</autobiographical-note>

 .... Fancy words are often a disguise for ignorance) the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American.

First pride ourselves *n (the * is just a wildcard; I could make the enquiry more general: pride *sel* *n, to include myself, themselves... etc, but I've already spent too long on this):

This seems fairly clear, In an admittedly small corpus (relatively small, that is, among corpuses, but still pretty extensive), 'Pride ourselves on' outnumbers the 'in' version 10:1  (11:1 if you include 'upon').

And the 'take pride in' expression is more unanimous; nobody says 'take pride on' (well not yet anyway).

Meanwhile in COCA the difference is less marked, though still over 4:1.

And the 'take pride *n' variants are pretty unanimous, although a tiny percentage of users (0.0022%) have written 'take pride on' (which I'd put down to interference in the opposite direction – from 'pride oneself on' to 'take pride in').

But this is beginning to fail in the 'So What? Stakes'.

b

Update: 2023.01.12.20:55 – Added PS

PS
I can't be the only one who found 'pride ourselves on' disturbing (or at least distracting). There's now a new version of the trailer, with the same images but a new opening line.

And now all this

De-noelification has occurred. (And don't bother looking that one up; it's home-made). None of this 'The decorations stay up until twelfth night' business; not chez Knowles. The old year was be-tinselled (another roll-up, I'm afraid). But it is a Knowles tradition that New Year's Day is marked by the removal of all signs of merry-making, accompanied by the New Year's Day Concert from Vienna. The lion's share (lioness's share, come to  think of it) of the removal was done by MrsK, but it fell to me to disentangle the two strings of lights after their hasty (and somewhat unscientific, if you ask me) removal from the tree.

<autobiographical-note type ="rant">
It was the work of minutes to separate the two, apart from one loop; so it should have been a simple matter of removing one end of the wire from the plug and passing it through the loop. But I reckoned without the Health and Safety Executive. There was a 'safety plug' (a sealed unit, un-unscrewable), so I had to either cut one wire and then join it together again (how would the HSE like that?) or cut the idiot-proof plug off and replace it with a proper (i.e. serviceable, no really, serviceable) one.

I opted for the latter, not without a searing sense of annoyance at having to waste half an hour doing the thing properly, because of being taken for a numpty. Just because a few idiots can't be trusted to wire a plug safely the rest of us have to waste time on workarounds for things that shouldn't need to be worked around. But I digress.
</autobiographical-note>

Monday's job was the dismemberment of the Christmas tree (the stripping of the tree, I suppose, neatly book-ending the process that started with the dressing of the tree). And I was struck again by a question that doesn't occur to the blissfully uncluttered minds of those who know the song only in the English version:

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree,

How lovely are thy branches!

But the Tannenbaum, to give it its due, isn't like that at all:

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,

Wie treu sind deine Blätter.

Not 'branches', 'leaves'; not 'lovely', but 'true/loyal/faithful/ constant...'.

<tangent type="Aha, not thought of that in a while">
In  both German and English, the words for 'leaf' and 'sheet of paper' are the same. Another Germanic language, Norwegian, has the famous periodical (originally a 'daily [news]-sheet', though now it's a tabloid) Dagbladet.  Latin too, though I'd guess the Romans didn't have much cause to talk about sheets of paper, pre-Gutenberg. Etymonline makes the English usage a borrowing from Late Latin:

</tangent> 

Two recent memories

Yuletide media consumption has sparked a couple of memories:

Sign salvaged from
the ABC Forum, Easling

• A TV repeat of Zulu on New Year's Eve reminded me of the guilt that prevented me enjoying the latter part of the film when I first saw it, aged 12, at the ABC Forum in Ealing (since its redevelopment in 1975,  commemorated chiefly in this sign, shown here):
  
  Egged on by my middle brother (a Bad Influence, RIP), we paid for the 1/9s (that's just under 9p) and moved, via the gents, to the half-crown seats (12½p). I was sure for the rest of the film that we were going to be called out as juvenile delinquents.
  
  
• Hugh Bonneville, interviewed on a post-Christmas Newscast filler, recalled what to some listeners must have seemed an improbably violent attack made on his sister with a sledgehammer because she had stuck her tongue out at him. Sisters sticking their tongues out can inspire acts of improbable violence in the most peaceful of boys. In my case it was half a brick, rather than a sledgehammer.
  
  She (I'm not sure she was alone, but I'm pretty sure my middle sister was the tongue-protruder) was retreating up a fire escape leading to the habitable part of the house.. The missile fell far short of its target, between two treads (there were no risers), and smashed the window of the semi-basement's bathroom (newly refurbished as a self-contained flat), chipping the newly installed bath.
  
  I remember no repercussions. Daddy (who died the day before my 10 birthday, so he's still 'Daddy') was probably abroad at the time, and my mother (whom saints preserve and they better had) understood how annoying older sisters can be.

Onward and upward.

b

WHAT sort of boeuf?

The present state of the kitchen (with two saucepans fresh from the oven) reminds me of this piece, which I wrote two years ago – almost to the day:

<pre-script> 

On the last Saturday in November (that's  how long I've been worrying at this bit of linguistic gristle) an article in The Times mentioned a reader who had been working away at an anagram for over 3 years. My mail to the Feedback column fell on stony ground, but here it is:

Leigh Carter‘s three-and-a-half year computer-assisted anagram search may have used tools that incorporated the "rule" my French master taught me more than 60 years ago: that cookery words that are based on a name are preceded by an implicit  "à la mode" and are therefore feminine - bourguignonne, mayonnaise... and dauphinoise.

However, I have often reflected, as a student of philology, that rules like this are usually the sign of a linguistic change in progress; I discuss a fascinating case here (about an early Roman Latin master's list of rules proscribing common errors). My most recent dictionary (Concise OED, 2013) lists dauphinois as a headword and relegates dauphinoise to a parenthetical "(also ...)". But Onelook (a web-based finder of dictionary entries) finds only one entry - Oxford's. (In contrast, it finds four - including Oxford's) for dauphinois. 

</pre-script> 

There my main area of concern (linguistic concern, that is  – I wouldn't like anyone to think I  get properly upset about stuff like this; what kind of nutter do you take me for?) was the ending of dauphinois/e. But that old post went on:  

<pre-script> 

[T]his does not apply only to dauphinois, for which Onelook finds only one entry. In the case of bourguignon (which I vainly, and – let's face – it mistakenly) whinged about here:

... (for example bon/bonne, cadet/cadette, Bourgignon/Bourguignonne... 

<mini-rant status="stillborn">
No, I won't but... If people would just pronounce the /n/ when they say Bœuf Bourguignonne.  PLEASE.
</mini-rant> 

... etc.)

The fight in defence of the rectitude of bourguignonne (according to the "B-G rule" [B-G being the French master who taught me it]) ...

<2022-afterthought>
(and rather neatly it repeats the initials not only of M. Baring-Gould but also of the first two syllables of the word in question)
</2022-afterthought>

...has been well and truly lost. Google finds 

About 9,010,000 results for boeuf bourguignon 

but only 

About 311,000 results for boeuf bourguignonne.

And the ...gnon version really has the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Teachers laying down rules are a sure sign that language is on the move.

</pre-script> 

That last sentence is worth underlining. In  the second paragraph of that unpublished letter, where I refer to a Latin teacher (or tourist guide, or whoever it was that compiled a list of common mistakes and the "correct" version) I touch on one of the main sources of information of use to students of the history of languages: contemporary advice about "correct" ways of talking. In What's BALD about a bat? I discuss the warning not to say CALVA SORICEM but rather VESPERTILIONEM (the source of our pipistrelle...

A pipistrelle bat (far from bald)

...) But the mistake (which seems to be based on a pre-existing underlying local word (the fancy word is "substrate") that meant owl; so that CALVA SORICEM, meaning 'owl-mouse' (making much more sense than 'bald-mouse', which it's manifestly not), is the source of the standard French chauve souris.

That's all for now.

b

 

OCR schmOCR

A letter to this month's CAM started:

I’d like to nominate CAM 96 for an ‘understatement of the year’ award. On page 26, Professor Suchitra Sebastian is quoted as saying a milligram of these materials contains 10^²³ electrons

After a certain amount of egg-sucking advice (presumably aimed at grandmothers who don't know what  10²³ means) the writer went on to point out that the editor had made a mistake:

The editor apparently read it as 1,023 and put “more than a thousand”, but a hundred sextillion is indeed more than a thousand – in fact it is a hundred quintillion times as much.

<autobiographical-note>
To save time I keep these magazines (and others, to MrsK's dismay) until the following number comes. Then I read the letters in the latest one, to find out which articles in the old one are worth reading.
</autobiographical-note>

The letter confused me: the quoted text said 10²³, and the editor had presumably seen that; so where was the mistake? When I looked at last month's CAM it became clear. Someone had pulled out a bit of text, summarized it, and set it in a larger font – a pull-out quote. I would expect a sub-editor to do that; hence my confusion. Though in a small office who knows what depths an editor must stoop to?

The text was this:

We understand how a single electron behaves, but a milligram of these materials contains 10²³ electrons and every one of them is interacting with every other one. It is similar to the collective behaviour you see in murmurations of swallows, where collectively they shape-shift and a new form emerges. That potential for completely unimagined forms of physics to emerge is what makes it so exciting.

The pull-out quote was this: 

We understand how a single electron behaves, but a milligram of these materials contains more than a thousand every one interacting with every other one...

But the editor (or whoever) was only partly to blame, as I found when I took a photo of the article, and got Google Lens to copy the text. Because of the limitations of the (otherwise amazingly accurate) OCR transcription, the superscript ²³ was read as 23 making the figure 1023. When working against the clock it would be easy not to stop and think 'Hey, that doesn't make sense; they're jolly small...'. It doesn't take an innumerate arts graduate (the sort of ignoramus who needs to be told that 10²³  "is read as ‘ten to the twenty three’ ", as the letter-writer helpfully explains) to make that sort of slip.

But there is a nit to be picked, one I almost missed, as the image is so descriptive:

...similar to the collective behaviour you see in murmurations of swallows

A beautiful and persuasive image; except that the swallows should have been starlings, the only birds that behave like this, according to this website:

Starlings

Starling murmuration is a fascinating natural phenomenon that is a wonder to behold. The beautiful sight of them flocking and flying in perfect formation is something you don’t forget in a hurry once you’ve seen it, but arguably, the most interesting fact about murmuration is that starlings are the only species of birds who do it. 

How's that for nit-picking? 

In passing

Radio 3's 'Composer of the Week' last week  was César Franck. I was listening ...

<tangent>
Among the many things I dislike about BBC Sounds is that it incontinently splurges out whole series at one swell foop, cluttering up the view of that week's listening, with the result that I oftem find myself listening to live radio and have to change channels when something comes up on the broadcast schedule that I've already heard asynchronously. (The number of Christmas Specials I've already heard is ridiculous.)

The answer, of courese, is to use another app with a more manageable interface – but that involves the converse problem: topical shows become available a month after broadcast.
</tangent>

...on Friday, and learnt that Franck was hurt in a traffic accident involving "a horse-drawn bus". For a moment I was surprised that the presenter resisted the temptation to point out that this sort of carriage with benches was called a char-à-bancs, the source of the English "charabanc" (with the French banc becoming "bang"  – a different [more English] sort of nasal a)...

<tangent>

On the subject of banks, a guest on a recent episode of Tim Harford's Understand the Econmy pointed out that banks (the financial sort) took their name from an obvious (now I think of it) physical object. Those money-lenders  in Lombardy (or wherever) used to offer their services in the open air, on benches.

</tangent>

...Then I realized that the presenter probably didn't know, if he read the report in translation.

Tha's all for today.

b

How not talk to a racist

Nearly five years ago, here, I wrote about the (new to me at the time) concept of pedigree collapse.

...the closer the consanguinity, the fewer the  maternal great grandparents. This pedigree shows how 1st cousins marrying share only three maternal great grandparents. 

When 1st Cousins M and F Marry

There is a corollary to this, which is hard to credit and seems counter-intuitive, but which Adam Rutherford explained in last Sunday's Private Passions: because of pedigree collapse, if you go back far enough, the family trees criss-cross so much that everyone living now is descended from everyone living then. For people of broadly European heritage, this point is about 1000 AD. So everyone in that population is descended from Charlemagne. (But don't get too cocky; we're also descended from Ivan the Terrrible.)

So the answer to William Wilberforce's question (for those of the XY persuasion, at least) is "Yes. I am a man and a brother."

Dr Rutherford went on to recount the story of a taxi driver who had asked him where he was from; he said he was born in Ipswich but now lived in Dulwich. This didn't satisfy the driver, who asked 'But where are you really from?'

<background>

In his book How to Argue with a Racist, Adam Rutherford writes:

I am mixed race, or dual heritage, or biracial. Half-caste is a term which has fallen out of favour, but for much of my life that is how many have described me, some out of habit, occasionally in a dismissive way. I am often asked where I am from, and I adjust my answer by second guessing what they are really asking. Britain, England, Suffolk, Ipswich or London, where I have lived for twenty-five years. All are true, but often, what they are really asking is why do you look the way you do? 

So I wonder why he doesn't answer that question. In the same book he writes

My father was born in Yorkshire, with both his parents being White and British. My mother is British and Indian, though she has never set foot in India. She was born in Guyana in South America. Her grandparents were shipped there from India in the nineteenth century to work on sugar plantations under the auspices of a colonial edict known as Indenture - a form of semi-forced migration and labour that is a shadow of slavery. She emigrated to England in the 1960s, in the wake of the Empire Windrush, the ship that brought 802 Caribbean women and men to begin new lives in Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. Like them, she was a British citizen invited to the homeland of the colonies as the imperial age waned 

This does the job, although the version Sarfraz Manzoor gave on The World Tonight last Wednesday, mutatis mutandis (that's Latin for 'making the obvious changes, duh'), "I come from X ^UK but my people came from Y ^{HERE BE DRAGONS} "

</background>

As I said, I have to wonder why he doesn't answer that question. I know he is a firm believer in the accuracy of his research, but this makes him insist on coat-traiing when there is anyone who hasn't learned the Gospel According to A. Rutherford, giving him the chance to Make a Point.

<autobiographical-note>

This is a position that I know only too well. Many's the time that I have rocked the social or professional boat because of my insistence on sticking to an academic truth. On one memorable (well, I remember it) occasion I upset my toddlet (at the time) son, and his mother asked 'Did daddy shout at you?' He answered 'No, but he used his shouty voice.'

<parenthesis>

I'm reminded (with almost negligible relevance, but you're used to that, aren't you?) of a scene in the West Wing when CJ is being prepped for a court hearing. The lawyer asks 'Do you have the time?' and, looking at her watch, she says 'A quarter of two' (or whatever). Whereon he says 'I wish you'd stop doing that.' She asks what, and he says 'Giving more information than the questioner asks for. In your case, the answer was "Yes".' (I saw this several years ago, so it's not verbatim; but you get the gist.) 

My point is that sane people operating in society do more than just answer questions mechanically, but guess what the questioner really wants. This tolerance is the grease that makes society work.

</parenthesis>

</autobiographical-note>

This came up in that The World Tonight program, when a huge kerfuffle ...

<tangent>

(cause célèbre would be a bit of an exaggeration, though when Twitter gets its teeth into an issue like this it quickly becomes one) 

</tangent>

...kicked off about an old woman's insensivity, which  led to an event variously described as hostile, hurtful, unwelcoming, violent...

Of course, I am a WASP (or more accurately WAS RC_lapsed), so I'm in no position to say how non-WASP people feel about this sort of questioning. But it seems to me that there is room for more tolerance and understanding in this area, and blighting the few remaining years of an elderly woman is itself at best intemperate and at worst (ironically) insensitive, not to say plain stupid (though perhaps I mean childish?)    

b

The uneven playing field

A lot of ink has recently been spilled on a story that makes extravagant claims such as this:
There’s Never Been a Crash Test Dummy Modeled After a Woman—Until Now
As Boot might have said in  Scoop, "Up to a point".

What is true is that until now, crash-test dummmies designed to simulate women have been based on the original male ones, and besides there was no requirement for them to be taken into account. A less breathless and more measured account of the creation of the new dummy is given in Popular Science,  

It had been a long time coming. As the WI's Female Crash Test Dummies says

Female crash test dummies do exist but they are not mandated to be used in most tests. A pregnant crash-test dummy was created in 1996 but testing with it is still not government mandated either in the US or in the EU.

Women will not be surprised at this framing of the rules without reference to them (to put it at its least selfish; some people have suggested that it's a conspiracy by men to tilt the rules against anyone who isn't a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.) 

Another area where standards favour (or at least fail to consider) women is office temperature. A 2021 article in Nature found that

[O]ffice temperatures are less comfortable for women largely due to overcooling. Survey responses show that uncomfortable temperatures are more likely to be cold than hot regardless of season. Crowdsourced data suggests that overcooling is a common problem in warm weather in offices across the US. The associated impacts of this pervasive overcooling on well-being and performance are borne predominantly by women. The problem is likely to increase in the future due to growing demand for cooling in increasingly extreme climates. There is a need to rethink the approach to air-conditioning office buildings in light of this gender inequity caused by overcooling.

And this is ironic in the light...

<tangent subject ="stick-in-the-mud, moi?">

And, unlike whoever wrote that Nature article, I still care about which light I'm talking about.
<tangent>

... of a study which found that 

Women's brains work better in warmer offices

.

But male designers of the world aren't content with just ignoring the needs of just over half of the world's population. They also arrange some things to favour women, who are, on average, not as tall as men. Those things are, of course, the things that men don't want to do. Building regulations, or at least standard design (I don't intend to search the actual "Regs") dictate a height for kitchen worktops that suits the shorter worker.

<autobiographical-note>
In the summer of 1970 I did a holiday job on a recently completed Northwick Park Hospital. Sub-contractors had increased costs they were charging, the client had baulked at the new payments and had asked the subcontractors to economize. So there was one lot of estimates and a new set of accounts. This provided opportunities for fraud, and it was thought that a bunch of school kids would be less likely than forensic accountants (less likely, and cheaper) to have the wool pulled over their eyes. One of the economies was that a low-maintenance  [but costly] floor-covering was replaced by a cheaper alternative.

In the summer of 1971, for only a day or two, I did a job at the same hospital, now open. That cheaper floor-covering had to be polished every day with big Columbus Dixon machines, which seemed (to me) to have a will of their own. Which way they moved (right or left; forwards was down to the operator) was controlled by the angle of the handle. And the sweet spot (where left became right) was well below my waist. The foreman, a good foot less tall than me, couldn't understand my problem. He kept demonstrating how easy it was. But I jacked it in. Curvature of the spine.
</autobiographical-note>

But last week, alerted by Pick of the Week, I discovered a conversation with Holly Smale about her autism. It spent years undiagnosed and misdiagnosed partly because of the belief that "The typical autistic person is a boy". No. The typical autistic person DIAGNOSED IN CHILDHOOD is a boy. A girl with autism behaves just as obsessively, but nobody notices because girls should be seen and not heard. Listen to her; I recommend it. I particularly like the duck/frog bit at the end, where she talks about spending her first 39 years being told she's "a shit duck" only to find out that actually she's a frog.

Word watch

I've just spotted a new meaning of the verb "drop". Since embracing the world of podcasts I have come to recognize the intransitive use, when applied to a podcast, meaning become available/be listed by podcast providers You can't listen to a podcast until it drops...

<sideswipe>
By the way, it isn't then "downloaded to your phone", pace Chris Mason's lamentable Newscast outro. The app on your  phone just gets to know about it, so that you can download it if you're interested. This isn't  by any means the worst thing about that outro. (For the full rant see here.)  Just saying...
 </sideswipe>

...But earlier this week, on Newscast, as it happens, I was surprised (and momentarily misled) by a related, but transitive, use. Adam Fleming said "Netflix has dropped The Crown." Initially  I interpreted  this as analogous to "The BBC has dropped Bake Off". But I soon realized that it meant something quite different: If you have a Netflix subscription, The Crown has become available to stream – and that's another word that of late has been behaving differently.

And finally

There is an ongoing discussion in Rose Wild's Feedback column in last Saturday's The Times about using a preposition to end a sentence with. The latest  contribution is a letter from someone who decries 

...teachers and pupils who couldn't be bothered to learn or teach the finer points of English use correctly (sic).

 Rose Wild signs off (justly) unrepentantly saying 

...my point stands. There is nothing incorrect about a preposition at the end of a sentence.

OK.  But methinks Ms Wild doth not protest enough.  The correspondent is a pompous windbag, who no doubt blighted the English lessons of generations of young sufferers. Not everyone who believes in  this shibboleth is a pompous windbag; some of them, presumably, suffered this sort of teacher. But they are all wrong, and they are all misinformed

Time I did something useful; oh no, it's lunchtime.

b