If you’ve been seeing or hearing enshittify or enshittification in the last week or so, you have one man to thank: Cory Doctorow, the journalist, sci-fi writer, and co-author of the new book Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back.
technology
New voice transcription feature in Google Docs censors (some!) swearwords
Google Docs announced today that you can now create documents using your voice. And of course, like any good linguist, I immediately went to try to stump it. It’s pretty good, actually — it recognized both pronunciations of “gif” and “aunt” in the contexts “animated ___” and “uncle and ___” although it tended to assume that I might have the bit/bet merger, which I most emphatically do not, and thus presented me with a few transcriptions that felt like odd candidates to me.
But then I tried swearwords and hit the fucking jackpot. Continue reading
Sweary links #5
Here’s what you missed while you were reading the clean stories: Continue reading
Burn in 7734, you Arsenic Sulfur
Since Strong Language launched, I’ve been cursed. I am seeing swears everywhere. I am hearing swears everywhere. I am constantly thinking about swears and I am swearing about swears. I’m dreaming swears. I’m conjuring up swears where there aren’t even swearwords. While it’s no coprolalia, it is a fucking shitshow. But this is nothing new.
As kids, we capsize calculators: 58008 is flipped into “boobs” or 7734, “hell.” As if charting sweara incognita, we scour maps for Beaverlick, Kentucky or Fucking, Austria. Phonebooks are prank fodder: Mike Hunts, in all their Simpsonian glory, have long unlisted their numbers. Phone numbers are curse codes: It didn’t take long for people to discover that the Obamacare hotline, 1-800-318-2596, dials up some choice words, if we decipher the telephone keypad.
Strong Language 