[HN Gopher] Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google ...
___________________________________________________________________
Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it
wasn't enough
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 234 points
Date : 2024-09-17 13:16 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (quoteinvestigator.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (quoteinvestigator.com)
| sohkamyung wrote:
| The quote in full is: "I Had Exactly Four Seconds To Hot Up the
| Disintegrator, and Google Had Told Me It Wasn't Enough"
| interestica wrote:
| > Chandler played cricket when he was young, and he may have been
| influenced by the term "google" which is applied to balls which
| break or swerve.
|
| I think the author means "googly"
| emmelaich wrote:
| Yep.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googly
| qup wrote:
| There's a documentary called Mountain Talk and the folks in the
| Appalachians used an adjective "si-goggling" which meant out of
| square, crooked.
|
| Lots of similarities there, too.
| fundad wrote:
| I'm old enough to recall my youth glueing irises loosely
| encased in occipital domes onto craft projects. The kids today
| call them googly eyes.
| pimlottc wrote:
| I get stuck into some kind of infinite reload loop on iOS Safari
| for this site, anyone else?
| tsujamin wrote:
| Yep same, I thought it was lockdown mode but it's nice to know
| it's just generally broken!
| throw310822 wrote:
| "Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction. It's a
| scream. It is written like this: "I checked out with K 19 on
| Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch
| on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. Then I got stuck into some kind
| of infinite reload loop on iOS Safari for this site- I
| thought it was lockdown mode but it's nice to know it's just
| generally broken"
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| Worked fine for me on iOS safari just now. Maybe it was
| temporary?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| No problem for me with Chrome on Android.
| causal wrote:
| Love the irony of someone mocking science fiction being an
| accidental prophet
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/apollos-gift-of-prophecy-dodg...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Something something infinite monkeys, something something
| Nostradamus. I'm sure Captain Beefheart lyrics are prophetic
| too, like Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish.
| detourdog wrote:
| His lyrics are prophetic but somehow he always plays the
| exact opposite note than one might expect.
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| The old man the boat.
| card_zero wrote:
| The horse raced past the barn fell?
| kylebenzle wrote:
| The name Google was chosen because it's kind of sciency and
| sounds funny.
|
| Googly, Goggle, Gogle...
|
| It's a funny word that's been used for 100+ years. No irony
| necessary for a word to be reused for its intended purpose.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Chandler's parody sounds as if somebody discovered salt and
| immediately put a spoonful into their dish. Still while I read
| through it I was curious about every term used. While if it
| featured mundane things like doors, guns, grass and whatever I'd
| be immediately bored.
| zooq_ai wrote:
| Balls that go in the opposite direction (of normal) is called
| Googly
| bisRepetita wrote:
| Reminds me of the people who looked for time travelers, hoping
| they would have betrayed themselves through chronologically wrong
| Google searches or tweets.
|
| https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/google-search-fails...
| lostemptations5 wrote:
| We are real though.
| nick3443 wrote:
| Sorry I missed our coffee date next Tuesday.
| julesallen wrote:
| Go easy on calling yourselves "QI", the hugely entertaining BBC
| TV show might have some qualms about this.
|
| https://www.qi.com/
| gpvos wrote:
| The website has existed since at least 2010, so I guess they
| are aware and have considered this.
| card_zero wrote:
| The whole thing:
|
| "I checked out with K 19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out
| through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I
| cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright
| blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked
| on the heat bars and the Brylls ran swiftly on five legs using
| their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was
| almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer
| through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The
| thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains.
| The Brylls shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping
| on them with the poltex. But it wasn't enough. The sudden
| brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen.
| I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google
| had told me it wasn't enough. He was right."
|
| I like how Chandler writing sci-fi sounds exactly like Chandler
| writing one of his gumshoe stories. It's terse and tense and
| cynical. The protagonist drives a vehicle into some kind of
| ambush, and everything's incredibly snappy (including the
| scenery). Not at all like the actual sci-fi author who turned the
| parody into a complete story, and felt compelled to _discuss_
| something in the middle of the action, and ruined the pace.
|
| I don't think "Google" here is a machine or all-knowing entity,
| sounds more like it's just some guy. With prior experience of
| disintegrating Brylls.
| zeristor wrote:
| William Gibson on Chandler:
|
| https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...
|
| Via
|
| https://archive.ph/qmwKj
|
| " GIBSON When science fiction finally got literary naturalism,
| it got it via the noir detective novel, which is an often
| decadent offspring of nineteenth-century naturalism. Noir is
| one of the places that the investigative, analytic, literary
| impulse went in America. The Goncourt brothers set out to
| investigate sex and money and power, and many years later, in
| America, you wind up with Chandler doing something very
| similar, though highly stylized and with a very different
| agenda. I always had a feeling that Chandler's puritanism got
| in the way, and I was never quite as taken with the language as
| true Chandler fans seem to be. I distrusted Marlow as a
| narrator. He wasn't someone I wanted to meet, and I didn't find
| him sympathetic--in large part because Chandler, whom I didn't
| trust either, evidently did find him sympathetic. But I trusted
| Dashiell Hammett. It felt to me that Hammett was Chandler's
| ancestor, even though they were really contemporaries. Chandler
| civilized it, but Hammett invented it. With Hammett I felt that
| the author was open to the world in a way Chandler never seems
| to me to be."
|
| Assuming, of course, that The Gibson hasn't been hacked.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >sounds more like it's just some guy
|
| That should be apparent to anyone that can read, I think people
| just like to pretend to be dense for some reason.
| fenomas wrote:
| I'll be damned! One of my favorite Chandler quotes, I've posted
| this a lot of places over the years.
|
| That said, the last time I looked into it sources all agreed that
| the comic strip Barney Google was a _very_ well-known pop-culture
| reference when Chandler wrote this, and will surely have been the
| first thing he or anyone he talked to would think of when hearing
| "Google". (TFA mentions this as if it was one of several
| possibilities, but the others seem very shaky.)
|
| So it seems pretty clear he meant it, and expected the reader to
| take it, as a silly last name.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >So it seems pretty clear he meant it, and expected the reader
| to take it, as a silly last name.
|
| A lot of these 'mysteries' that get brought up over and over
| online tend to have very easy to figure out answers, but people
| would rather be confused for some reason.
| detourdog wrote:
| They are words out of their context and humans love to make
| meaning. Think how surreal things will get now that time has
| sped up from Chandler's time.
|
| As mysteries they are powerful. So far there was only 1
| commenter that knew of Barney Google. The knowledge spreads
| the mystery dies.
|
| I knew nothing of the passage before this thread and when I
| was reading through the comments. I thought this was recent
| sci-fi that was being posted at a site called tv tropes.
|
| The Google reference was obviously a future form factor for
| Google services.
| xipho wrote:
| For a moment I thought quote-investigator was a LLM startup app,
| and was about to be seriously impressed by the attention to
| detail, citation list and meticulously formed credits, but alas,
| the origin was just a squishy human.
| jerf wrote:
| For those who have not dipped into the so-called Golden or Silver
| Age science fiction, Chandler's pastiche is quite accurate. There
| was a lot of what TV Tropes (warning: TV Tropes) refers to as
| "Call A Rabbit a 'Smerp'":
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmee...
|
| Even the mere act of walking out to one's "car", opening the
| door, getting in, and zooming away could be an act of adventure.
|
| It would still be quite purple [1], though. A well-known trope of
| the time. For some reason TV Tropes hadn't covered it yet,
| though, so I guess we should cut the authors some slack on that
| front.
|
| I would consider "My breath froze into pink pretzels."
| effectively unredeemable, though. Malzberg's rehabilitation
| attempt on that fails, in my opinion, and by the time someone
| wrote around it I think the surrounding prose would already have
| passed the Purple Event Horizon itself.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| "My breath froze into pink pretzels."
|
| The temperature in the synthetic atmosphere wasn't precisely
| enough to prevent the character's exothermic respiration from
| condensing, inconveniently.
| jerf wrote:
| It's the word "pretzel", honestly. I can cover breath
| freezing pink by the standards of the era, no problem. Took a
| shot to the lungs & helmet and left to die on the ice planet.
| I doubt that would "really" produce frozen pink breath but
| what we would now consider "hard" sci-fi that would care
| about that sort of thing generally didn't travel with this
| sort of purple prose so that's not really an issue.
|
| But pretzels? Why is your breath freezing in _pretzels_? Even
| pretzel "rods", let alone twists?
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| The atmosphere isn't homogenized perfectly, leading to
| turbulent condensation.
|
| Micheal Crichton's Sphere mentions this (actual) fact in
| regards to certain gases, such as Helium, being needed in
| high pressure environments to counter act oxygen poisoning
| and nitrogen narcosis, but due to differing thermal
| properties, can lead to hot/cold spots, thermal turbulence,
| etc.
| Vecr wrote:
| I never understood why the spaceplane had an atmosphere
| with helium in it, though. Either Crichton messed up or
| got confused about the mixing issues there (as well as
| the massive logistics problems, the plane was huge).
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| The spaceplane had an completely imcompressible hull, no
| synthetic atmosphere was required - in fact,
| serendipitulously an overkill herring, was the perfect
| atmosphere for humans.
|
| It was the underwater habitat that had the possibility of
| extreme temperature gradient fluctuations.
| Vecr wrote:
| It was at standard pressure (sea level ish)? And the
| nitrogen's fine for coming and going to the habitat as
| you wish (without the bends) because the pressure's so
| much lower? What about the oxygen toxicity from breathing
| normal air? Is that also fine because of the low relative
| pressure of the oxygen containing gas?
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| I'll have to revisit the chapter but I believe there was
| a few pages about the door, and a large hiss.
|
| I assume the spacecraft detected and matched the
| artificial habitats - that's what I had meant, not
| surface atmosphere.
| derefr wrote:
| As a sci-fi writer who likes a spot of silly world-building
| myself, this line doesn't seem particularly _absurd_ to me,
| but it _does_ paint me a mental image of something the
| author very likely didn 't intend to communicate:
|
| Picture a world whose surface is covered in an ocean of
| hyper-oxygenated dense fluid (like the kind used in liquid-
| breathing experiments.)
|
| (The fluid isn't cold! The "freezing" isn't a description
| of the temperature, but of motion ceasing.)
|
| Now imagine this fluid with the appearance of a gel ant
| farm, with eaten-through trails in it -- but rather than
| these trails being hollow, they're full of a cotton-candy-
| like pink "fluff".
|
| Why? Through some kind of chemical reaction, exhalation of
| the now-CO2-saturated-and-warmed fluid into the medium,
| causes the formation and rapid expansion of a (pink!)
| aerogel, where the "gel" is "something from the fluid, plus
| water from your breath" and the "aero" is "nitrogen and
| CO2".
|
| This aerogel is neutrally or even positively buoyant
| relative to the dense medium -- so it doesn't _fall_ or
| _pour_ out of your mouth, but rather _worms_ its way out,
| curving around your face in a random, pretzel-like
| extrusion pattern, _fighting_ its way out, _pushing_
| against the working fluid.
|
| I would imagine that, to continue to breathe safely in this
| strange medium, you would have to 1. always breathe in
| through your nose and out through your mouth; and 2. ensure
| that the reaction product of your exhalation doesn't linger
| to stick to your face as it forms.
|
| So the optimal way to survive, would be to constantly,
| briskly walk backward, with this exhalation product
| extruding away from you like a rocket engine's exhaust (or
| perhaps more like spaetzle) as you walk.
|
| I imagine you would frequently walk through trails of (your
| own or others') exhalation product. Which might feel
| somewhat like walking through gathered up hunks of
| spiderweb.
|
| I also imagine that this reaction would _probably_ be
| happening to some degree in your throat and lungs as well,
| rapidly giving you something like silicosis. Depending on
| how much tension you want in the plot, you could either
| just embrace this as "putting a timer on" getting off this
| planet; or you could posit that the character would be able
| to pry just the filter from their rebreather, using it to
| ensure that the reaction never occurs inside of them (but
| further increasing the strain of breathing in this medium.)
| mgsouth wrote:
| Don't forget the the, uh, pink widows? _Rosencrantz_
| ("they're pinkish and make you dead, like him and
| Gildunstern"). Venemous ambush predators, low density
| (mostly made of this aeogel with hydrogen bladders).
| About an inch across and 8 inches long, like pink
| hovering snakes. They float, hiding in the exhalation
| contrails, waiting for prey to blunder into them.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Sounds like something Peter Watts might have invented. I
| like it, sort of; almost plausible, barely survivable,
| and deeply unpleasant.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| I revisited a summery, carefree 90s hit last year, and I
| immediately exclaimed, "these guys are ON DRUGS!"
|
| https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Len/Steal-My-Sunshine
|
| Confirmed by promo video footage
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I have to admit i read the comments before i read the article
| and this comment made me feel like I was having a stroke
| setgree wrote:
| The second chapter of Anne McCaffrey's 'Dragonflight', written
| in 1968, opens with: "F'lar, on bronze Mnementh's great neck,
| appeared first in the skies above the chief Hold of Fax, so-
| called Lord of the High Reaches."
| ryangs wrote:
| I think proper nouns get a bit more of a pass in terms of
| purple prose.
| setgree wrote:
| I also enjoy the non-standard punctuation, e.g. F'lax --
| how would you pronounce that?
| FactolSarin wrote:
| The apostrophe here most likely represents a glottal stop
| (as in Hawai'i).
| pavlov wrote:
| In Finnish, the apostrophe marks a syllable break between
| instances of the same vowel, and sounds like a very short
| pause. Maybe they use Finnish spelling rules on this
| planet.
|
| Example word: vaa'an -- genetive of "vaaka" = "scale"
| mock-possum wrote:
| Ooh this is fun trivia - originally dragons had a hard
| time with human names, so it became a tradition for
| dragon riders (particularly males) to adopt the dragon's
| pronunciation as an honorific. So "Simon" becomes
| "S'mon."
|
| You say it with a bit of a slur - suhMON or fuhLAX -
| where the first syllable is not only unemphasized but
| uttered as quickly as possible then slurred into the
| next. F'lar really is just "fuhLAR"
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| IIRC, dragonriders always elide part of their name, and
| indicate the gap with an apostrophe. It's consistent and
| explained in the text at some point.
| tialaramex wrote:
| McCaffrey is on that TV Tropes list, I have only read a few
| of her novels and she does jump out for obvious examples of
| this trope.
|
| It's tricky to write an opening sentence though. We all
| recognise "Call me Ishmael" and probably "Last night I dreamt
| I went to Manderley again" is obvious to lots of people but
| for example, "I am always drawn back to places where I have
| lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods" doesn't exactly
| promise Breakfast at Tiffany's does it?
|
| By the second chapter I think you've earned a lot of leeway,
| either the reader is engaged and will soldier on despite your
| six new nouns and what might be a new word or possibly a new
| meaning for a word they know already - or they have probably
| set the book down some time ago and will never see this
| sentence anyway.
| Suppafly wrote:
| Maybe because I read a lot of scifi and fantasy, despite not
| having read any Anne McCaffrey, but that doesn't seem
| particularly hard to parse or understand.
| permo-w wrote:
| it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one
| sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't something I
| love reading either.
|
| I'm reminded of the Illuminatus Trilogy, which at times is
| barely more than proper nouns arranged into sentences at
| random. like Finnegan's Wake but with more flower power
| aredox wrote:
| It reminds me of opening the bible - especially the books
| in the old testament- or any old compendium of legends
| from ancient civilisations.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| > it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in
| one sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't
| something I love reading either.
|
| Even so. If the sentence was something like "Kowalski's
| Mosquito soared high above the Fuhrerbunker, Hitler's
| final redoubt in Berlin," no one would find that
| problematic. McCaffrey's sentence is only troubling if
| you've already assumed that made-up names are inherently
| bad writing.
| bmacho wrote:
| Made-up names are bad to read for me too. I don't like
| too many things in my head with unfamiliar names. I can't
| _think of_ things with unfamiliar names, and it bothers
| me.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| That sounds very unpleasant. I'm sorry. With all respect,
| though, I think we can agree that that's an issue with
| the reader, not the writer? If I read a novel with a lot
| of Vietnamese characters and locations, say, I might well
| have some difficulty telling them apart, but that doesn't
| mean that Vietnamese names are bad writing.
| sideshowb wrote:
| You seem to be suggesting that it's good writing style to
| make your reader struggle as if with a foreign language?
| mannykannot wrote:
| The thing about the alternative you offer is that none of
| the names in it are made-up, other than that Kowalski may
| be a fictional character.
|
| There is nothing inherently wrong with made-up names, and
| some genres will require more than others, but I suspect
| that sentences in the style of McCaffrey's are partly
| intended to draw in the reader who feels, vaguely and
| probably subconsciously, as someone who has the inside
| scoop on esoteric knowledge from having deduced what sort
| of entities these names denote. To be clear, I am not
| immune to the effect, and it can be pleasant in small
| doses if the rest of the story is engaging.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| That maybe very well be true, but it still doesn't
| indicate any problem with the McCaffrey sentence.
|
| Also note that it's the start of the _second_ chapter, so
| some of those nouns may have been introduced already.
| rectang wrote:
| Compare with the first sentence of _The Silmarillion_ by
| J.R.R. Tolkien:
|
| > _There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called
| Iluvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones,
| that were the offspring of his thought, and they were
| with him before aught else was made._
| setgree wrote:
| except for 'Arda', every new word is defined/clarified.
|
| I'm a huge LOTR fan and a moderate Silmarillion fan, and
| I can see how maybe Tolkien is guilty of this 'new words
| for familiar things' problem.. I guess when Tolkien does
| it, I'm enchanted, e.g. the first non-introduction line
| in _Fellowship_:
|
| > When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he
| would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday
| with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk
| and excitement in Hobbiton.
|
| To me this immediately evokes: we're in a foreign land,
| but it's going to be vaguely small-town England in its
| manners and interests.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| Not surprisingly, Robert Anton Wilson, one half of the
| writing team behind Illuminatus, was a huge fan and
| scholar of James Joyce. Indeed in the first volume, the
| character Epicene Wildeblood writes, a damning dismissal
| of what is obviously meant to be the trilogy itself,
| describing it as "a very pretentious imitation of
| Faulkner and Joyce"[1]. I can't think of anything _more_
| Joycean. (Epicene doesn 't think much of science fiction
| either, even when she transitions into a more relaxed
| Mary Margaret Wildeblood in the later Schrodinger's Cat
| trilogy.)
|
| [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Ill
| uminatu...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in
| one sentence.
|
| F'lar is unexplained within that sentence. Mnementh is
| also unexplained, but sounds like a constellation.
|
| Fax and the High Reaches are explicitly marked as the
| names of a person and a place. Those are going to appear
| as proper nouns no matter what genre you're reading. It's
| the only possible way to do things. This is like
| complaining that Robin Hood's primary antagonist is the
| Sheriff of Nottingham. What's the complaint?
| aaroninsf wrote:
| What's funny is that this register and conceit is one that I
| dearly love among science fiction and fantasy writers,
|
| provided they fulfill the implicit promise, that on a second
| reading all such things will be clear.
|
| It's an intentional device. Andre Norton is particularly
| adept at this: when accounting for my deep love of her many
| thin "pulp" novels, many of which exist in the same universe,
| something I regularly praise is the way she almost as a
| signature drops you without exposition into drama.
|
| The conceit of a chatty expositional conversational narrator
| who can in effect be imaged to be turning to their friend-
| from-out-of-town to helpfully explain what this thing is or
| what the significance of that is--often with a presumed
| familiarity with the frame of reference their audience might
| hanve--is by contrast a crutch and now most characteristic of
| what we call Young Adult fiction.
|
| Trust in the reader, and trust in their sufficient interest
| to file such things away, is, I think, characteristic of a
| different era--one that demanded more of readers. I don't
| think it's a coincidence that our own era finds this off-
| putting.
|
| We're lazy now, and we have small token windows.
|
| EDIT: and I could probably have reproduced, or at least
| completed, that line of McCaffery's, from memory--though that
| particular book shows its age and its history in being the
| first short story she wrote about her world Pern. She got a
| lot softer and more sentimental as she went along, and less
| prone to patriarchal stereotypes she brought along from her
| work as a romance writer.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Fortunately, science fiction left behind those inclinations.
| The cyberscapes of the glittering arcologies where street sams
| zero every gonk, rimbo, and cyberpsycho that comes their way
| for fun, eddies, or to just to look nova to their favorite
| input or output demand your data be crystal, choom.
| bentcorner wrote:
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose
|
| Enlightening article - this is the exact complaint I have with
| the world-building Bungie does, and now I have a word to
| describe it. Halo is somewhat grounded, with Humans feeling
| familiar but the Covenant are both literally and literally (!)
| purple. Destiny is (IMO) so full of pink pretzels that it's
| undecipherable to newcomers.
| permo-w wrote:
| "My breath froze into pink pretzels." was the only bit of the
| excerpt I found interesting. I suppose pretzel is a bit of a
| kitschy choice for the centre of a metaphor, but the overall
| effect of it was to raise some interesting questions: is there
| a breathable atmosphere for humans that could precipitate pink
| ice breath? is our protagonist even human? is there a shop
| nearby selling Judaism-adjacent baked goods?
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| I can't remember the details, but sometime in the '70s or '80s
| a sci-fi magazine ran a contest: take a short text (something
| like "a man gets onto a bus and notices another man wearing an
| unusual hat") and rewrite it in the distinctive style of a sci-
| fi writer of your choice.
|
| The winning results were pretty entertaining. I only remember
| the Heinlein entry having something like "Why, he's using
| plasteel for his helmet liner instead of ferrocrete!"
| tetris11 wrote:
| I would love to see a Gene Wolf rendition of that
| acchow wrote:
| > Even the mere act of walking out to one's "car", opening the
| door, getting in, and zooming away could be an act of
| adventure.
|
| It's incredible how much screen time is dedicated to the
| opening/closing of car doors and the the driving of cars
| into/out of parking lots or driveways. Tho I guess this
| somewhat reflects life in America.
| fwip wrote:
| Easy transitional/establishing shots. Serves the same sort of
| purpose as when the show/movie serves up some wide shots of a
| city or the country, informing the viewer "we are at a new
| location," but more personal.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| I was today years old when I found out about Quote Investigator
| :-)
| kps wrote:
| Sadly, Google (Gemini) is aware of the quote, and does not
| provide an unbiased determination as to whether four seconds is
| enough to hot up the disintegrator.
| pigeons wrote:
| Claude refuses to answer because it won't assist with
| information about weapons.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Barney Google aside, it's worth wondering whether the same
| process that led to Google being called Google instead of Googol
| is what led Chandler to use that word: it's a memorable, alien-
| sounding word, misspelled.
| dylan604 wrote:
| As a kid in the 80s, my parents bought an encyclopedia set that
| also had a set of companion books for kids. This is where I
| first learned about a google, and it was definitely google not
| googol. So it's been "misspelled" for quite some time if that's
| your belief
| wpollock wrote:
| Maybe on purpose. Most print encyclopedias included small
| typos and small fake articles, so they could prove plagiarism
| if needed. (I use that same excuse to explain all my
| published errors:-)
| karaterobot wrote:
| I don't know why it'd be a matter of belief, it's a known
| word with a known prescriptive spelling. I'm sure the
| encyclopedia editors would have liked to get it right. But
| it's an interesting anecdote. A googol is an uncommon item of
| vernacular usage, and basically trivia for most people. I
| remember hearing "a googolplex" on elementary school
| playgrounds, as an example of a number so large you couldn't
| conceive of it. "You're stupid times infinity", "No, you're
| stupid times infinity to the googolplex power", and so on.
| And since the word doesn't follow intuitive spelling rules in
| English, I imagine it would have been very easy to spell it
| wrong in the 80s, unless you happened to both have access to
| specific resources, and remembered to look it up.
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| This is largest juxtaposition between familiarity and nostalgia
| against an outright alien uncanny facade of fiction.
|
| A dissociative, delirious, memory. Orthogonal to our current
| experience, but barely.
|
| These two songs are the closest I could find in an analogous
| auditory form.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE5JMEu5hZA
| nashashmi wrote:
| I often wonder what would happen if the founders didn't misspell
| the word. And today we would be saying Googolled.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I still have no idea how to reconcile by merging with
| gravitational time dilatation being infinite at event horizon.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Makes me think of
|
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/01/detecting-time-trave...
|
| And also Asimov's classic _End of Eternity_
|
| https://ia800500.us.archive.org/13/items/calibre_library_68....
|
| where a time traveller who overshoots his target and winds up too
| far in the past posts a classified on March 28, 1932 with a
| picture of a mushroom cloud and the title All
| (the) Talk Of (the) Market
|
| As literature I think (1) it reads like Chandler, (2) reads like
| a non-genre writer imitating the genre such as E.B. White in _The
| Morning of the Day they Did It_ (who even scoops Rachel Carson)
|
| https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1950-02-25/flipbook...
|
| I'd say real genre writers such as Heinlein, Asimov, and Doc
| Smith were always more careful how they used neologisms and
| didn't just drop them out rapid fire in search of affect. But you
| sure see that in parodic material such as _Calvin and Hobbes_
| (which would parodize Chandler _and_ sci-fi)
| cyberax wrote:
| I'm not saying that it was time travel, but it was time travel.
| dhosek wrote:
| When Google first came on the scene, I often mistyped its domain
| name as googol.com. At some point since 1999, Google bought
| googol.com and redirected it to their site.
| nbernard wrote:
| Well... Wernher von Braun wrote a SF novel in which the first
| mission to Mars discovers native Martians. These live underground
| and use hyperloop-like tunnels for transportation, and their
| leader is called the "elon"...
| phkahler wrote:
| What book is that?
|
| Edit: Found it -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale
| aaronharnly wrote:
| This book from 1931 deserves a mention as well:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Google_Book
|
| it includes verses like: The sun is setting -
| Can't you hear A *something* in the distance
| Howl!!? I wonder if it's - Yes!! it *is* That
| horrid Google On the prowl!!!
|
| I own a copy of the 1979 edition and the illustrations are just
| wonderful.
| jujube3 wrote:
| The Google:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/The_Goog...
| Nihilartikel wrote:
| I'm reminded fondly of the opening chapter to QNTM's Fine
| Structure, which sets up the story with a similarly baffling (yet
| self consistent, in my opinion) but wildly evocative narration of
| a blazing dogfight across a multiverse of hyperspaces.
| renewiltord wrote:
| A 'googly' is not a google, what is this nonsense hahaha.
| Seriously getting Baader-Meinhof from this website which I used
| to trust.
| kazinator wrote:
| In one of the episodes of the 1970's Japanese anime series
| _Gatchaman_ (known in North America in a heavily edited and
| abridged form as _Battle of the Planets_ ) there is a sequence in
| which a navigation screen is shown. A destination point is shown
| with a pin mark exactly like that balloon thing on Google Maps. I
| can't remember which episode. I don't have that series on any
| hard drive any more.
| soyiuz wrote:
| "Mr. Google, the best filing clerk in the firm. Filing & Office
| Management: A Constructive Monthly Magazine on Business Methods.
| July 1921."
|
| https://x.com/dennistenen/status/1017125225484505090
| mannykannot wrote:
| Nick Lowe, in _The Well-Tempered Plot Device_ , is quite brutal
| in his criticisms.
|
| https://ansible.uk/Ansible/plotdev.html
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > the book "In the Plex" by journalist Steven Levy presented the
| following explanation for the name choice:
|
| >> Page's dorm roommate suggested they call it "googol." . . .
| "The name reflected the scale of what we were doing," Brin
| explained a few years later.
|
| >> Page misspelled the word, which was just as well since the
| Internet address for the correct spelling was already taken.
| "Google" was available.
|
| This is interesting, since the story I heard was that they
| settled on the spelling after an early investor made a check out
| to that spelling.
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