2048
Two hours into her investigation, the reality was unavoidable; Hazel was going to have to consult the splunk team. She facepalmed as she let out a frustrated sigh. The ticket had looked easy enough when she picked it up.
Hazel glanced at her time hud. 3:14 on Thursday. Blessedly little time before she could cast off the privilege and responsibility of being a verse fixer and just be for a few days. But whoever she ended up bothering would be annoyed about starting a big task just before the weekend. Splunkers had a reputation for spending all of their free time with their kids, and Hazel felt an involuntary twinge of guilt about pulling their attention away from that. She thought about calling it a day early, maybe halfheartedly dealing with emails before picking things back up on Monday.
No. She’d done that before. The unresolved problem would occupy her thoughts all weekend, casting a subtle gray dread on everything. Better to take care of it now.
She closed her left eye and sent off an immediate service request with splunk, feeling a little self-conscious. Hazel knew the eye-closing thing made her look like a clueless millennial, but she’d never gotten the hang of glance-typing. 140 wpm had been fast enough for her parents, and it would be fast enough for her.
Request confirmed. Hazel dismissed her monitor and started heading to the nearest elevator. The trip down was uneventful. She didn’t interact with splunk that often. Those programmers were all graybeards obsessed with life before the verse. Weirdos. She got off on 14, scanned in, and crossed into what they called the splunkers’ lair.
Blinking her left eye, Hazel noted Olivia Nguyen had accepted her request. She quickly memorized the route to Olivia’s desk before reopening her eye, flushing with embarrassment.
At least the system hadn’t given her someone new. Hazel had chatted with Olivia a few times and worked with them twice. Another unchead splunker, graying hair and forever lost in history. Olivia was old enough to grow up under the old net, before the verse took over. Old enough to have gone to college and gotten one of those 4-year degrees. They did at least genuinely enjoy splunking, so Hazel felt a bit better about imposing on their time.
Olivia greeted Hazel with an uncharacteristic grin. “Ooh, the deep systems this time! I haven’t dug around down there in months.”
Hazel involuntarily winced. “Yeah, I followed the issue back across the bridges to a core timing thing. This bug’s been around for twenty, maybe even thirty years. Glad to have your help.” She pulled up a chair at Olivia’s desk.
Olivia started hud-sharing as they navigated down through strata of code accumulated over decades. It was the first time Hazel had gone this far back. She vaguely recognized the bottom layer they’d arrived at as C++. Hazel’s eyes widened as she noticed a class name. She knew the verse had been called Fortnite back in the 10s, but hadn’t realized they kept the old name through most of the 20s.
Given some time, Olivia zeroed in on the problem and let out a knowing chuckle. “I should’ve known, it’s from back in the early agent days. See? Signed by Claude Code, April 2026. Broke this function when it was changing something else. Skill issue. Simple fix, really, but easy to overlook back then. I don’t think we’d even invented talents yet.” While Hazel chewed on the knowledge that the entire world had been slightly broken for longer than she’d been alive, Olivia put together a patch and kicked off the test batteries.
Another ticket closed, another tiny flaw smoothed out in the Epicverse underlying all of civilization. Hazel thanked Olivia for their help, congratulated them on a job well done, and started walking back to her desk. She tried to make her wink look casual. Her hud said 3:51. She’d finish up on time after all. Hazel smiled and started mentally planning out her weekend as she set her work blocks to expire in 10 minutes.
schmancy
The casual adjective schmancy first appears in a 1976 American newspaper, a clipping of fancy-schmancy. That particular form first shows up around 1935 and is obviously derived from fancy.
The posh adjective fancy is a generalization of the noun fancy from 1753. The passing desire fancy is in turn a contraction of the word fantasy from the late 1500s. The imaginary dream fantasy is a borrowing from Old French fantasie, probably some time in the 1300s. Fantasie is directly descended from Classical Latin phantasia, which is a borrowing from Ancient Greek φαντασία (phantasía), meaning “apparition”, in the BCE years. Φαντασία is derived from φαντός (phantós), meaning “visible”, sharing a root with φάος (pháos), meaning “light”.
As with other ancient words, we can compare it to similar terms like Sanskrit भास् (bhā́s), meaning “light”; Persian بامداد (bâmdâd), meaning “dawn” or “morning”; and Old High German bouchan, meaning and the ancestor of English “beacon”. Applying what we know about systematic sound changes over the past 6000 years lets us reconstruct a theroetical common ancestor, PIE bʰeh₂-, meaning “shine” or “glow”.
There’s a pretty wild set of more direct English descendants from the Latin and Greek branches of that tree, like photo, phosphor, emphasis, photon, and phantom. But wait, what was that bit about fancy-schmancy again?
Photo of a fancy-schmancy multi-story dining room aboard a cruise ship. A central chandelier warmly lights the many elegant balconies and tablecloths.
A massive wave of Jewish emigrants fled persecution in Germany and Poland in the 1920s and 1930s. The US in general, and New York City in particular, was a popular destination. During this period of close contact, American and NYC English borrowed a lot of words from Yiddish like schmuck, putz, schlong, and some words that don’t mean “penis”. Some of those borrowings retain a whiff of their New York roots today, like schlub and schlep. The language contact in that period was so intense that English even borrowed a grammatical feature from Yiddish, a historical rarity.
Shm-reduplication is a construction used in English and Yiddish to indicate irony, skepticism, or derision. The archetypal example I reach for is “Consequences, schmonsequences”, but usages like “waiter, schmaiter” and “discount, schmiscount” feel plenty natural. Schm- is extra unusual in its role of a productive English duplifix. That is, you can apply it to words no one has applied it to before and expect to be understood, like “rizz, schmizz” or “Spiderman, Schmiderman”.
It’s a specific example of the more general linguistic phenomenon reduplication, where repeating an utterance changes its meaning. Some English examples include “yeah, yeah”; “like like” (as in, “do you like like him”); and “hear, hear”. Onomatopoeiac words like “blah, blah” and “choo-choo” seem especially open to reduplication. It’s more common in other languages, often taking on grammatical roles like pluralization or intensification.
In English, it’s more typical to find ablaut reduplication, where the vowel changes, rather than repeating an exact copy. You can determine specific patterns about which vowels can work this way. Rather than giving the specifics, I think it’s more fun to give a bunch of examples (and invite you to come up with your own) and see what you can see.
- dingdong
- zigzag
- crisscross
- tip-top
- knickknack
- chitchat
- tic-tac-toe
- bing-bang-boom
Now you know something about English that you knew but didn’t know you knew!
Clean Air and Clean Water
The proposed EPA budget for 2027 is $4.2B, a 52% cut from the actual 2026 budget of $8.82B. This won’t necessarily go through. The proposed EPA budget for 2026 was originally $4.16B, a 54% cut from the actual 2025 budget of $9.14B. But just because self-inflicted disaster was averted once doesn’t mean it must happen again. This year’s push to stem the tide of chaos and exemplify the virtue of maintenance will involve work, stress, and political concessions. It’s framed so that a hard-fought agreement on a 4% cut will feel like a victory. It’s exhausting and it feels like it never gets better.
I can’t help with the exhausting part. It sucks. But I can tell a story about how it once got better.
Why does the EPA exist in the first place? As the TSA’s example illustrates, government agencies don’t just spring into being for no reason. President Nixon, a Republican, signed an executive order creating the EPA in December 1970. The first Earth Day was also celebrated that year, on April 22, 1970. What happened in 1969?
Well, there’s the obvious event. The Apollo 11 moon landing, and the space race in general, gave people renewed perspective on the isolation and fragility of the Earth. But what else? LA’s smog problem was common knowledge, comparable to Beijing in 2010. NYC’s air pollution was even worse. Its third smog disaster in 15 years took place on Thanksgiving weekend in 1966. (The Pokémon Koffing and Weezing were named “Ny” and “La” in an early beta.) But the event with the most direct line to the EPA’s establishment was the Cuyahoga River catching on fire in June 1969.
Black-and-white photo of the Cuyahoga River on fire. Most of the frame is filled with smoke. Firefighters on a bridge on the left spray water at the blaze from hoses.
It sounds dramatic when stated that way. But the Cuyahoga River, which runs through Cleveland, had actually caught fire 12 times in the last hundred years. The river was well-known as a polluted hellscape, an open sewer littered with bubbling oil slicks that killed any wildlife unlucky enough to drink from it. If anyone fell in, they got sent to the hospital. That was simply the price we had to pay for industry. No one had any examples of anything better.
But the fire got a writeup in Time Magazine on July 31, 11 days after the moon landing. We actually don’t have any pictures of the 1969 fire; it was a minor one that firefighters were able to put out within 30 minutes. The photo Time ran, reproduced above, was a photo of the more destructive 1952 fire. National Geographic later ran a cover story including it in December 1970.
Americans across the political spectrum became convinced both that there was a serious problem and that we had to do something about it, even though nothing like it had ever been solved before. The Clean Air Act, established 1963, was strengthened in 1970. in Greenpeace was founded in 1971. The Clean Water Act was passed in 1972.
And it eventually worked! The EPA declared Cuyahoga River fish safe to eat in 2019. The Hudson River was toxic as recently as 1990, but today the first leg of the NYC triathlon’s involves swimming in it. As for air quality, here’s two ways you can look at the same data. You could look at the change in US air pollutant emissions from 1922 to 2022 (the most recent year in this data set):
Or you could look at the change in US air pollutant emissions from 1972 to 2022, the period where we committed to reducing them:
It’s easy to focus on climate change, an intractable devastating problem that no one has ever solved before, and despair. It’s not obvious to look back at clean air and water, DDT, CFCs, acid rain, and leaded gasoline, and hope. I elect to do both.
On the event of its 56th ever occurrence, Happy Earth Day.
Engineering words for everyone
One interview question I enjoy getting as a mid-career engineer is, what’s the most impressive feat of engineering you’ve seen in your lifetime? I answer without doubt or hesitation. It’s UTF-8.
What do I find so impressive about UTF-8? Let’s go on a historical tour of the ways people convert words into signals for transmission and storage, character encodings.
Diagram showing each letter and numeral with its Morse code representation.
Morse code (1844). Initially assigned numbers to words using a codebook, like all of the other telegraph code systems. Instead started assigning codes to letters and having the letters spell out words on their own in 1840. Estimated letter frequency by looking at how many of each letter there were in typesetting equipment, assigning shorter codes to more common letters for faster transmission. Served as the US standard for over 100 years, emphasizing what a wildly powerful one-shot it was. International Morse, the version we use today, was standardized in 1865 based on German Morse. The OG. ★★★★☆
Photograph of an 1871 Chinese telegraph codebook, open to a table of 200 Chinese characters and their corresponding numeric codes.
Chinese telegraph code (1871). An example of a ridiculously bad encoding. Designed by foreigners. Used the codebook approach to assign each Chinese character to a number from 0000 to 9999. Sent the number using International Morse. Numbers are the slowest characters to transmit in International Morse. Just about maximally slow. ★☆☆☆☆
Screenshot of a Wikipedia page showing a table of EBCDIC glyphs and their corresponding hexadecimal codes.
BCDIC (1928). Stands for Binary-Coded Decimal Interchange Code. A way to represent letters on punch cards designed for numbers by assigning a two-digit code to each letter. Developed by IBM for use in electromechanical tabulating machines. Represented 48 glyphs with the numbers 0-63. Extended into EBCDIC in 1964 (whence the E), used in IBM computers once those were invented. Perfectly serviceable. ★★★☆☆
Table of the 128 ASCII characters and their corresponding decimal, hex, and binary representations.
ASCII (1963). Stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. An elegant, logical mapping of every key a typewriter could produce, plus the most essential machine control instructions, into 128 glyphs. Really great for English text! The (American) IBM engineers definitely knew what they were doing by now. The only problem was that sometimes, some people wanted to display text that was not in English. Served as the US standard for 25 years. Brilliant and efficient. ★★★★☆
Diagram showing the 256 glyphs represented in Latin-1.
Latin-1 (1985). Often called ANSI, which actually stands for American National Standards Institute. Actually developed by the European Computer Manufacturers Association, trying to construct a single text encoding that all of Europe could use. The limit of 256 glpyhs meant they had to make some tradeoffs, not fully supporting any language. Missing glyphs include French œ, German ẞ, Finnish š, and the Hungarian ő found in Erdős. Mostly solved the encoding problem for most European languages for the next 25 years. The rest of the world used a horrifying jumble of competing encodings (ask me about Shift-JIS some time.) A solid working solution for an intractable problem. ★★★☆☆
Screenshot of xkcd comic 927. Transcription available at https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/927:_Standards
Unicode (1991). Born of a utopian dream to develop one universal standard that covers everyone’s use cases. Aims to define a single encoding that can represent any text that any person has ever written. Governed by the Unicode Consortium. Ran into two seemingly insurmountable problems: 1. Using it doubled the size of text written in Latin-1. The fastest modems available in 1991 had a transfer rate of 1.2KiB/s, so it was critical to optimize even text transmission sizes. 2. It only had space for 65,536 glyphs. This is not enough glyphs to encode even all of modern Chinese. There was a proposal to expand the space to 4.2 billion glyphs, but at the unworkable cost of doubling the text size again. Points for originality, I guess. ★★☆☆☆
UTF-8 (1993). Stands for Unicode Transformation Format (8-bit). Radical solution that made everyone happy (except for CJK languages, which got screwed over by the consortium in the 1990s. Every country with its own script now has a seat on the consortium for this reason). Varies the length of the encoding based on the glyph, at the cost of significantly increased size and complexity. English could keep its precious 8-bit characters (128 glyphs), all European languages handily fit in 16 bits (2,048 glyphs), and even Classical Chinese has more than enough space at 32 bits (1.1 billion glyphs). The best character encoding so far. ★★★★★
Screenshot of a graph showing the usage rates of character encodings on the Web each year from 2001 to 2012. UTF-8 goes from 0% to 64% while ASCII goes from 57% to 17%.
That earlier XKCD comic, which ran in 2011 when UTF-8 adoption was around 52%, specifically uses character encodings as an example of a universal standard that never actually works out. Today, 99% of all websites use UTF-8. Its wide rollout was not without its challenges, but by and large proceeded smoothly. Experienced programmers today wonder why they have to specify UTF-8 everywhere, when there’s hasn’t been a reason to consider anything else in the past 10 years. It’s like how every single DNS resource record since 1985 has had to specify “IN” so we know it’s on the Internet, and not some other global network it might have been on in the 1980s.
And that Internet in question? It runs on text. Text, which must have an encoding, makes up five of the seven layers that in turn make up the Internet. It’s like we took a plane in flight and swapped out all of its engines. And no one noticed. A monumental feat that no one outside the field is aware of. This is the kind of massive infrastructure upgrade that engineers everywhere should strive to emulate.
The wordification pipeline
The folks who compile the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth OED) think a lot about English words, and what qualities are necessary to make an utterance count as a word. I’ve found it rewarding to browse the guidance and materials they release as part of this process. For example, I really enjoyed their article on word frequency bands and their characteristics. Earlier this year, this instinct led me to learn about their schema for how a weird sound that falls out of someone’s mouth, or a calculated keysmash that falls out of someone’s brain, becomes a real, certified word. (In this case, the certification involves inclusion in the OED.)
Let’s say that I, a humble blogger, write a thinkpiece about how TV seasons optimize for fictional parasocial relationships, which are good to cultivate. I jocularly coin the term “pseudoparasocial” within. They would call that a coinage. Other lexicographers might call it a hapax legomenon, a Greek term for a word that appears only once. Hapaxes and their cousins can also be a fun topic to learn about if you’re the kind of person who reads articles like this one.
If I really like the sound of my own voice when I say “pseudoparasocial” and start injecting it into conversation, that term is now part of my idiolect. (If you like the sound of my voice, could I interest you in using the term neoretrofuturism to refer to cyberpunk?) I use it, and people understand me as well as they usually do, but no one else uses it.
If the term catches on in my friend group, and has enough memetic fitness that they also start using it in their friend groups, it might eventually become a regionalism after a few successful hops. Instead of my friends and their friends, if it were my colleagues and their colleagues, the term might instead begin to be considered jargon.
Once it’s gained enough cultural cachet that other bloggers begin to write thinkpieces about the term “pseudoparasocial”, they’d call it a neologism. Most other dictionaries would include the term as a word at this point, but not the OED. A work that aspires to define every word that has ever been written in the English language, in all of history, must have stricter critieria for inclusion to avoid getting swamped. So it is only if the term has enough staying power to maintain its cachet for a few years that their elite lexicographers would deem it a word.
I find myself comparing and contrasting this wordification pipeline with the path a work takes to enter the American cultural canon. In this instance, what I mean by “cultural canon” is the set of media that everyone knows that everyone knows. Some examples from the late 1900s might be Terminator and Jurassic Park. The ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz or Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. It’s no mean feat for a work to become well-known enough that it enters the zeitgeist, but the vast majority of those works do not then go on to become part of the cultural canon. One thing all four of the works I mention have in common is, they were all made before a hypothetical 25-year-old American was born. Works that successfully make it into the cultural canon need to somehow cross that vast chasm, somehow convincing people it’s worth their time to watch a thing their parents watched.