Word: wordings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...minded. The U.S. Patent Office encountered this problem in an acute form when it began planning a computer designed to extract from its memory all earlier mentions of a patent-seeking idea. Patents are described in ordinary English, and ordinary English proved too imprecise for literal-minded computers. The word glass, for instance, means a material and a long list of things made out of that material. It also means additional things (water glasses and eyeglasses made of plastic) that have nothing to do with glass. Such things confuse computers...
...leap this communication barrier, Engineer-Lawyer Simon M. Newman of the Patent Office has been working out a synthetic language called Ruly English that is especially adapted to a computer's huge but simple brain; unlike ordinary, "unruly" English, it gives one and only one meaning to each word...
More complicated words of Ruly English are meant to eliminate confusion caused by differing points of view. Both a watch spring and a heavy bridge girder are flexible in some degree. Both are also somewhat rigid. All objects, in fact, lie somewhere on the scale between extreme flexibility and extreme rigidity. So Newman has arbitrarily coined the Ruly word resilrig to cover the whole scale, and has added such prefixes as sli (slightly) and mb (substantially). In Ruly English, a bridge girder would be sliresilrig and a watch spring subresilrig. A properly trained computer would know the meaning exactly...
...face and figure are unfamiliar. But this week, when the black-haired, violet-eyed beauty strides across two pages of the movie trade papers, dressed in nothing but a wet white silk shirt, Hollywood will get the word. "R.B."-the modest monogram on the shirt's breast pocket-tells it all. Russell Birdwell, Hollywood's busiest huckster, is on the job. After a brief dry spell trying to direct pictures (The Girl in the Kremlin, Flying Devils), and a few months of promoting such inanimate products as automatic laundries, "the Bird" is back at his appointed task: fabricating...
Russell Juarez Birdwell, a slimmed-down, mustachioed version of the late Bob Benchley, has a secretary in constant attendance to record his every word, suggests that his glibness is an inheritance from his father, a Texas revivalist preacher. From his mother, says the Bird, he got an appetite for cash. "She always insisted that we work and save. When I was small, I made money by trapping and skinning skunks.'' Young Birdwell soon learned that there are as many ways to make pocket money as there are to skin polecats. In high school and the University of Texas...