an un-AI-able quiz question?
via barbecues and Apollo 13
Yesterday marked the first barbecue of the year. Do you opt for BBQ? Barbeque? Barbie? I usually write barbeque, but apparently, that is ‘incorrect’. When checking the spelling, I discovered that the word ‘barbecue’ (and presumably its variants) is used in space (whaaat?!) “in the phrases barbecue mode and barbecue manoeuvre describing the rotation of a spacecraft to allow the heat of the sun to fall on all sides”1. Obviously, I googled to find out more, and this ‘barbecue mode/manoeuvre’ or ‘roll’ – also called Passive Thermal Control or PTC – is even referenced in the film Apollo 13. Tom Hanks (playing astronaut Jim Lovell) says:
“Uh, Houston, we are ready for the beginning of PTC, and I think once we're in that barbecue roll, Jack and I will eat.”
Well then, I guess I’m going to be rewatching Apollo 13, which, by the way, is going to be 30 years old next year.
Anyway, this post wasn’t going to have anything to do with BBQs (artistic licence to not be consistent – this sentence just felt more BBQ, okay), but apparently, I’m finding it a difficult rabbit hole to climb out of now that I’ve fallen in . So, I’m just going to have to start again.
Yesterday marked the first barbecue of the year – at a brilliant Beano-themed birthday party barbecue, no less. After food, cake, party bags, presents, and several rounds of whoopee-cushion hilarity, we all settled down to do a quiz. I think it was the Britannica ‘What on Earth!’ quiz, and encompassed neurons and trees, Papua New Guinea and Greenland, lightning bolts and wombats.
On the way back home – driving into the prettiest sunset, which made the M25 look a bit like the yellow brick road – I was thinking about how lovely it had been to be able to wonder and guess during the quiz, without looking anything up on our phones. It’s quite hard to find something ‘these days’ that can’t be googled. (By the way, in a news story that passed me by at the time, ten years ago: the Language Council of Sweden included ‘ogooglebar’ meaning ‘ungoogleable’ on their list of new words, and Google tried to pressurise them to change the definition.2)
Doing the quiz got me thinking about what I might include if I set the questions. I guess I’d draw on the stuff I know best – the world of words.
So, naturally, I got out my alphabet hankie to consider some possible topics.
(Don’t judge me for not having ironed it, okay?)
I had in mind to write a quiz question for each of these A–Z images – maybe that’ll be a Christmas ‘treat’ for you all … But when I saw the ‘e for eggs’ (which, following an afternoon of Beano-based conversation, looked much more bottom-shaped than probably the illustrator intended), it made me wonder what ‘easter eggs’ of hidden meaning the average dictionary might contain.
By this time, it was getting pretty late, but my brand-new quizmaster brain was whirring, so I got into my PJs, fetched my (now quite old and very well-used) Penguin dictionary3 off my shelf, and started reading it like a bedtime story.
A few minutes later, my partner steps into the room: ‘You’re taking the actual dictionary to bed now?’
Yes, so, I start reading.4 I begin, as you might expect, from A, and already the entry for ‘A’ itself could form a full quiz-round of questions: from diatonic scales to antigens to different types of alphabets. But it’s not quite what I’m looking for – it doesn’t have that ‘easter egg’ vibe. I press on, chewing through abalone, wandering through abbess and abbey, pocketing the lovely abeam to use another time.
This is the sort of reading that, for someone else, might be a bit like counting sheep. But for me? My mind is ablaze with new ideas. And besides, it’s not quite ‘lights out’ time yet – nighttime ablutions are yet to take place (I still gotta brush my teeth).
As I scan the page, there it is, right there between A-bomb5 and abomination (which, I note, go hand in hand), hiding in plain sight between them:
abominable snowman n (often Abominable Snowman) a large manlike animal reported as existing high in the Himalayas. Also called YETI.
My quiz question, then, is:
Are ‘abominable snowman’ and ‘yeti’ the synonyms that are furthest apart from each other in the alphabet?
I slept on it, and still couldn't better it in the morning. I turned to my phone. Had I discovered an ungoogleable un-AI-able quiz question?
Read on if you want to see how AI fared. Or, if you’d like to search your own brain archives to see if you can find the farthest reaches of synonym land (in UK English or your language/alphabet of choice), then look away now.
After drawing a blank on google, I asked ChatGPT. Firstly, it ‘showed its workings’ by telling me:
‘To find the synonyms that are furthest away from each other in the alphabet, we can look for words that start with letters that are at the opposite ends of the alphabet and have similar meanings.’
Yes.
Its best guess though?
‘Abandon and Zenith. These words are at opposite ends of the alphabet and have somewhat similar meanings. "Abandon" means to leave behind or forsake, while "zenith" refers to the highest point or peak.’
Which is a headscratcher in itself, isn’t it?
Unconvinced, I tried some more AIs: Perplexity, which didn’t get any closer. And then Claude, which did:
Apex
&
Zenith
Of course! Mountain peaks. That must be the winner?
And, happily, a perfect setting for possible yeti sightings.
From the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, edited by Julia Cresswell (Oxford University Press: 2021).
Penguin is the dictionary I use for quick offline reference, partly because it just happens to be the one I’ve always had on my bookshelf, though I have different go-to dictionaries depending on what I’m looking up. P.S. There was big dictionary news this week in the editing world: the Associated Press Stylebook is changing its official dictionary to Merriam-Webster (AP has used Webster's New World College Dictionary since 1977).
There’s that present tense form we chatted about in the comments on my second-ever post on Substack
Which I’ve also written about in my post about the film Oppenheimer