Fritinancy

Word of the week: Watermark

How to tell when that nicely phrased but possibly bullshit-laden piece of prose has been generated by artificial intelligence rather than ordinary human intelligence? One possible solution, proposed by seven companies active in the AI space, is digital watermarking.

iStock photo of water with watermarks 

 

According to a fact sheet released on July 21, the Biden Administration has secured voluntary commitments from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI “to help move toward safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology” and to alert people to deepfakes.

“It's currently unclear how the watermark will work,” Ars Technica noted in an article about the development, “but it will likely be embedded in the content so that users can trace its origins to the AI tools used to generate it.”  

You can read more about how the watermark might in fact work in Mark Liberman’s July 25 Language Log post, which, to be honest, strains my extremely modest technical comprehension. So let’s look instead at that word watermark, which branched away from its original aquatic meaning more than three centuries ago.

In design, a watermark is “a distinguishing mark or design impressed into a sheet of paper during manufacture, typically visible only when the sheet is held up to the light,” according to the OED, whose earliest citation for this sense is from 1708. This type of watermark was “probably so called because the watermark, being less opaque than the rest of the paper, had the appearance of having been produced by the action of water.”

Author’s note: Until I researched this post, I’d assumed that water was somehow involved in creating watermarks. I’d envisioned a die being pressed into a watery slurry as paper was being manufactured. But no!

July linkfest

Lots of news about Twitter this month; if you don’t care or are already saturated, feel free to scroll down to my Twitterless content.

The bluf: Twitter’s dark overlord, Elon Musk, announced on Saturday, July 23, that “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” And lo, by the following day the Twitter logo and name—but not the word “tweet”—had disappeared from the platform, replaced by a grim, spindly “X,” Musk’s favorite letter. (In 2000, he wanted to rebrand PayPal as X. He was ousted as CEO, but bought back X.com and went on to found SpaceX, name the Tesla Model X, and sire a child named, alas, Æ A-Xii.)

It’s not quite the end of Twitter, but it sure ain’t what it used to be. I wrote for Medium about what I’ll miss—and am already missing—about Twitter, which I started using in 2008, a lifetime ago.

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Word of the week: Pink

When I Googled “Barbie movie” yesterday, my screen blushed pink, with the Google wordmark standing out in darker pink.

 

Thanks to the movie-based-on-a-doll that opened last weekend, pink is the unofficial color of the year. It’s there in the bubble-gum-hued capital B on the movie poster.

It’s even the title of Lizzo’s contribution to the soundtrack.

“When I wake up in my own pink world / I get up outta bed and wave to my homegirls…”

 

I haven’t yet seen the film, but I’ve read thousands of words about it—enough to know that pink is its “signature vibrant aesthetic,” as Scientific American put it. (SciAm was interested in the psychological angle. “If Barbie was exposed to a single color her whole life, she wouldn’t necessarily register the world as pink but would instead likely see it as gray or neutral,” the magazine reported.)

I did my own research into pink and came up with these findings:

Name in the news: Brigid Alliance

The first time I encountered the Brigid Alliance name, abut a month ago, I was half-listening to an NPR story about abortion resources, and I heard the name as “Bridge It.” Which made sense, I thought: The organization exists to cover the costs of travel, food, lodging, and childcare for women (aka “pregnant people”) seeking abortions in states where the procedure remains legal—to bridge the gap, in other words.

But no: It’s Brigid, one of the spellings of an ancient Irish personal name whose etymology translates to “the High One.” And there’s an interesting story behind that choice.

Word of the week: Cage match

“Welcome to the age of the cage match,” read the headline on a July 7, 2023, story by Joseph Bernstein in the New York Times. (Free link here.) The subhed: “These days, powerful men want to beat one another. Literally.”

The main event, as Bernstein put it, is between the CEOs of Twitter and Meta. On June 21, Elon Musk (in the Twitter corner) let it be known to his 148 million Twitter followers that he was willing to fight Mark Zuckerberg—CEO of Meta, which launched Twitter rival Threads on July 5—in a “cage match.”

I’m up for a cage match if he is lol

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 21, 2023

Musk, who has been at various times in the last two years the world’s richest human, later tweeted that such a match might take place in the Las Vegas Octagon, or on second thought, in Rome’s Colosseum. (The Italian minister of culture reportedly issued an invitation.) He also proposed “a literal dick-measuring contest.” Zuckerberg, a fellow billionaire whose wealth usually places him within grasping distance of Musk, is a student of Brazilian jujitsu. Musk has admitted that he almost never works out.

 

zuck wins the cage match without ever stepping into the ring pic.twitter.com/f2nLWD80v8

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) July 10, 2023

Chalk it all up to the silly season, or to that male-primate-dominance thing, or to the “it’s just a joke lol” spirit of the age. (Neil Postman nailed it in 1985 with Amusing Ourselves to Death; Emily Nussbaum published a superb update in early 2017, “How Jokes Won the Election.”) In any event, I found myself wondering about the origin and history of cage match.

Name in the news: Opill

Earlier this week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the non-prescription sale of Opill (norgestrel), a progestin-only daily oral contraceptive. Although norgestrel has been used in prescription contraceptives since 1973, Opill is the first oral contraceptive approved for over-the-counter (OTC) sale in the U.S.

Opill’s manufacturer, Perrigo—an American-Irish company with headquarters in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Dublin—said the contraceptive will be available in the U.S. in early 2024.

Opill package

 

The announcement represents mostly good news for, as the website puts it, “people capable of becoming pregnant.” (The fly in the ointment: Under the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies aren’t required to cover the cost of over-the-counter birth control. Opill’s retail cost hasn’t yet been disclosed.) But what about the naming news? Good, bad, or meh?

New writing on Medium: Going somewhere?

My latest story for Medium, “Going Somewhere?”, looks at how, why, and when journey became a one-size-fits-all buzzword, standing in for experience, process, ordeal, happening, and series of events. From pregnancy journey to cancer journey, fitness journey to faith journey—and beyond—it feels as though everything in modern life has become a trip.

“The Incredible Journey: A Tale of Three Animals,” by Sheila Burnford (1961). The fictional story was turned into a 1963 live-action Disney film.

 

Here’s a friend link (no paywall) to read “Going Somewhere?” Here’s a list of all my Medium stories (72 so far!). And here’s a referral link to join Medium so you can read everything on the site and even become a contributor yourself.

Don’t forget to clap (up to 50 times per story!).

Word of the week: YIGBY

This acronym isn’t strictly new, but it was new to me when I saw it in the subject line of an email from California State Senator Scott Wiener, co-sponsor of SB 899, known as the Affordable Housing on Faith Lands Act. (Wiener, a Democrat, doesn’t represent my district, nor have I donated to his campaigns, but I get his emails anyway.)

The body of the email spelled out the acronym: “Yes in God’s Back Yard.”

Image via Giv4 Homelessness in San Diego

 

Book review: “Writing with Style”

It’s Independence Day here in the US, and how better to celebrate our divorce from the colonizers than with a book written by an American expatriate for reporters at a British publication?

 

Word of the week: Invisibilize

I don’t often read sponsored tweets—they’ve gotten especially peculiar and useless since You Know Who took over the joint last year—but a tweet from Fondation L’Oréal, the research-supporting arm of the global cosmetics company, caught my attention last week. One word in particular made me blink: invisibilized.

Promoted tweets no longer have date stamps, and although I captured a screenshot I neglected to save the original link. But this usage wasn’t unique; “invisibilization” showed up frequently throughout Fondation L’Oréal’s messaging in March, International Women’s Month. Here’s another tweet; here’s a LinkedIn post.

I’d never the seen the word, and I wondered whether it was a French import or one of those diversity-equity-inclusion buzzwords like “othering.” The answers, as far as I’ve been able to tell: not likely and maybe, sort of.