Doc Searls Weblog

Overheard

Copilot is the new Clippy.

Another one bites the sky

In NiemanLab, Joshua Benton asks, Will Pittsburgh become America’s most important city without a newspaper? Sure, if you're just counting the size of the city. But the paper itself was kind of a mess anyway, at least as Joshua tells it. I'm guessing that ways will be found to take up the slack. Journalists and philanthropists tend to do that. Businessfolk, less so. There is money to be made, just not much of it. My big question is what happens to the archives. I write about that, and much more, here.

Just (not) saying

I don't write on Substack, but I share an account: Reality2cast. It's for a podcast I do with Katherine Druckman, who produces it. The podcast has been idle for a while, and I haven't written on the newsletter side of the site since this in 2023. Still, I get an email whenever somebody new follows me/us there, which feels weird because I'm not saying anything there.

Is there a way to robo-write back to those people and tell them I'm here, or on one of my other two WordPress sites?

Why German keyboards wear out faster

I need to keep coming up with new titles for blog posts that might end up being on any number of subjects. Mittwoch jumped into my head because it's German for Wednesday. I took two years of German in high school, one of them twice, and gave them all back when I was done. But some stains remain, so I at least know the days of the week, auf Deutsch. 

Mittwoch, being German, makes more sense than Wednesday, because Mitte  means middle or center, and Woche means week. On the other hand, says Wikipedia, Wednesday "is derived from Old English Wōdnesdæg and Middle English Wednesdei, 'day of Woden', reflecting the religion practised by the Anglo-Saxons, the English equivalent to the Norse god Odin. In many Romance languages, such as the French mercredi, Spanish miércoles or Italian mercoledì, the day's name is a calque of Latin dies Mercurii 'day of Mercury'." 

Before I started writing this post, I had assumed that Mittwoch was probably what the Saxons brought to the Anglo-Saxon language that became English, but deeper digging reveals that the Anglo-Saxons called the fourth day of the week Wōdnesdæg. And Mittwoch is a modern German thing. So::::

• Old English: Wōdnesdæg (Woden’s Day)

• Middle English: Wednesdei

• Modern English: Wednesday

And old gods still live in modern English. Besides Woden (aka Odin), we have Thor (Thunresdæg), and Frigg (Frigedæg).

German also inconveniences its writers by capitalizing all nouns. So Web and Internet are both still correctly honored, being names, as proper nouns. But the damn shift key gets a workout, since there is no shortage of nouns. German also inconveniently features gendered articles, and not the usual two, such as we have in Spanish and French.  Or the one (the, an) we have in English. German features three definite articles: die (feminine), der (masculine) and das (neuter). From Mark Twain's The Awful German Language:

…a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female–tomcats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and NOT according to the sex of the individual who wears it–for in Germany all the women either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.

I suppose that's one more reason why I remember so little German. And why, of course, I expect (and welcome) correction of any or all the above.