Authentication-Results: minnie.tuhs.org; dkim=fail reason="signature verification failed" (2048-bit key; unprotected) header.d=dartmouth.edu header.i=@dartmouth.edu header.b="IEZr9iy9"; dkim-atps=neutral From: Douglas McIlroy Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2022 18:02:32 -0500 To: TUHS main list Subject: [TUHS] (no subject) Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "TUHS" > Ken and Dennis were teaching [the Votrax] to swear "Speak" being a phonetics-based program, I suspect they were exploring multiple spellings. Out of context, lots of spellings were indistinguishable. For example, cheap, cheat, cheek, chief was hard to tell from cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep.. At the risk of repeating myself, the fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck example came to the fore when a "speak" kiosk was installed at Epcot. PR folks were worried that people would try it on bad words in this public setting and asked me to block them. I said I'd block whatever words they told me to. Duly, I was sent a list--on the letterhead of an AT&T vice president. (Was that dictated to a secretary?) Later I heard that girls would often try friends' names, while boys would try bad words and exclaim that the machine didn't know them. In fact, those were among the few words the machine *did* know. Fortunately nobody ever complained that I hadn't blocked misspellings. Doug