What do Helen Keller, quantum computers, world records and words … – Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
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Cloudy with snow showers mainly during the evening. Low -3F. Winds light and variable. Chance of snow 70%.
Updated: December 27, 2022 @ 7:24 pm
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Helen Keller once said, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” And after a life in public libraries, I appreciate how Thucydides preceded Ms. Keller’s thoughts a couple of thousand years earlier when he wrote, “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.” That’s certainly necessary when faced with Y2Q, “the date when quantum computers will defeat public-key cryptography,” as defined by James Nguyen in his Cyber Crime Magazine article, “Y2Q Will Be Here Sooner Than You Think.” How soon? Some experts say within the next decade, but according to the Cloud Security Alliance, who recently established the Countdown to Y2Q Clock to track new developments in the race to create the first quantum computer capable of easily solving all current computer encryption, China’s ahead of that timeline. This has governments and businesses scrambling to collect encrypted information and storing it to read after Y2Q.
This waning time of the year seems better suited to reflecting on the recent past, like “The 10 Oddest Guinness World Records of the Year,” as reported by United Press International. These new records include “Longest Journey by Pumpkin Boat (Paddling)” — won by Duane Hansen, who paddled his hollowed-out pumpkin 37.50 miles — “Farthest Distance to Blow a Pea” (84 feet, 11.28 inches by David Rush, his 250th Guinness record, including the 52 he set in 52 weeks in 2021), and one for Rachel Schmitt, an American living in Ireland who donned the Most Underpants in 30 Seconds (19).
What about Library World Records, you ask? According to RecordSetter.com, it seems to be a battle between librarians in England, Canada, and the U.S., but they’re all so typically library-ish as to give one pause. For example, Canada rules when it comes to “Longest Conga Line in a Public Library” (64 people), and “Most Cardigans Worn at Once by a Librarian in a Public Library” (14). England has records for “Fastest Time to Check in a Shopping Cart Full of Books” (21.17 seconds), and “Most Pencils Laid End to End in a Public Library” (1,220). The pencil record is bogus, however, since they used regular length pencils, and everyone knows that libraries are the biggest consumers of stubby golf pencils (15,500 golf courses nationwide vs. 117,341 libraries). The record for “Tallest Golf Pencil Tower in a Public Library (75 levels) is held by Doug Grasty of the Thomas Ford Memorial Library in Western Springs, Illinois.
December’s the traditional time for dictionary publishers to trot out their Words of the Year, commonly referred to as WOTYs, and “Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year is Woman,” according to their press release. “This year, searches for the word ‘woman’ on Dictionary.com spiked significantly multiple times in relation to separate high-profile events, including the moment when a question about the very definition of the word was posed on the national stage.
Our selection of woman as our 2022 Word of the Year reflects how the intersection of gender, identity, and language dominates the current cultural conversation and shapes much of our work as a dictionary. During the height of the lookups for woman on Dictionary.com in 2022, searches for the word increased more than 1,400% — a massive leap for such a common word. The biggest search spike started at the end of March, during a confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who in April became the first Black woman to be confirmed as a US Supreme Court justice. Specifically, the surge in lookups came after she was asked by Senator Marsha Blackburn to provide a definition for the word woman” during the confirmation hearings. Searches for “woman” jumped again following the leak of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and in June when that was formally announced.
Dictionary.com added that “woman” first appeared in writing around 900 CE, and “the meaning is actually embedded right there in the roots of the word. Woman comes from the Old English wifman, which combines the words wif and man. The Old English word wif meant “female” or “woman,” and is the source of the word wife, which originally could refer to a woman regardless of marital status. The original meaning of man, meanwhile, was simply ‘person.’” Word search runners-up to “woman” are “quiet quitting,” “democracy,” and “the Ukraine flag emoji.”
The Oxford University Press’s WOTY choice, “goblin mode,” reflected their British orientation. It’s also notable for being the first to be selected by the public instead of the publisher’s editors, and according to the OUP it’s defined as “a slang term describing ‘unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy’ behavior’ … Although first seen on Twitter in 2009, goblin mode went viral on social media in February 2022, quickly making its way into newspapers and magazines after being tweeted in a mocked-up headline. The term then rose in popularity over the months following, as Covid lockdown restrictions eased in many countries and people ventured out of their homes more regularly. Seemingly, it captured the prevailing mood of individuals who rejected the idea of returning to ‘normal life’, or rebelled against the increasingly unattainable aesthetic standards and unsustainable lifestyles exhibited on social media.”
Merriam-Webster’s WOTY is “Gaslighting.” In the mid-20th century, when “Gaslight” was the titled of a popular play and movie, they defined it as “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator,” according to a Nov. 18 article on the company’s website. It goes on to explain, “But in recent years, we have seen the meaning of gaslighting refer also to something simpler and broader: ‘the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for a personal advantage.’”
Who is Merriam-Webster? It’s a company who adopted that name in 1982 to distinguish it from competitors who also included “Webster” in their dictionaries’ titles; previously it was called G. & C. Merriam Co., after its founders, brothers George and Charles who opened a printer-bookshop in Springfield, Mass. in 1831. Noah Webster, who first published his “An American Dictionary of the English Language,” in 1828, lived down the road in Amherst, where he was friendly with bookseller Joseph Adams, who, upon Webster’s death in 1843, wound up with the rights to Webster’s dictionary and a bunch of unbound copies of it, which were nonetheless expensive two-volume tomes. The Merriam brothers bought the rights from Adams and reset the book into smaller type that enabled them to produce fat, one-volume copies (with “unabridged” on the cover for the first time) which sold extremely well at only $6 a copy. Webster’s son-in-law, Yale professor Chauncey Goodrich, was the Merriam brothers’ editor and helped abridge the original dictionary in 1898 into a smaller version they called “the collegiate edition.”
Lawsuits in the late 1800s resulted in allowing any publisher to use “Webster” in its title, many of which simply plagiarized an existing dictionary. That’s why legitimate dictionary publishers began including a few bogus terms and definitions — aka “ghost words” — in their works so they could prove it in court. Examples of ghost words include “dord” (destiny), and “esquivalience” (“willful avoidance of responsibilities”), which seems mighty close to “goblin mode.” Some dictionary entries are unintentional mistakes, like the Oxford English Dictionary’s inclusion of “cairbow” a misreading of “caribou.” As psychotherapist Alfred Adler warned, “The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.”
Greg Hill is the former director of Fairbanks North Star Borough libraries. He can be reached at hillofbooks@gmail.com.
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