One of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes involved aliens whose book To Serve Man was a double entendre: They didn’t arrive on our planet to help, but rather to feast. Unfortunately, at the end of the episode humans learn the true meaning of “to serve man” a bit too late to save themselves. The characters in the story could have used a good epigrapher or translator, maybe one with a helpful Artificial Intelligence like Pythia.*
Pythia, the AI developed by Thea Sommerschield, Johnathan Prag, and Yannis Assael, can rapidly fill in missing letters of ancient damaged stone-tablet inscriptions. Like its Greek namesake, Pythia doesn’t necessarily give an exact rendering, but rather a set of possible letters and words. Like the misunderstood oracle that led to Greek tragedies for people like Laius, Oedipus, and Jocasta, the modern Pythia can also be misinterpreted because it provides a list of possible letters and words from which a human has to reconstruct the original.
It’s like playing Wheel of Fortune with a computer at your side. You might not get all the letters, but you can make a really good guess on the best possible fit of letters provided by the computer. Of course, even if you can put in the proper letters, you might miss the meaning as the characters missed the meaning of “to serve man” or as in the famous misinterpretation of a Japanese word mokusatsu during World War II.**
Actually, we could all use a Pythia to tell us what an Apollo wants to say. It seems that we frequently misinterpret or misunderstand one another or often speak or write elliptically. Social beings that we are, we’re constantly involved in expressing or in understanding, both of which are flawed enterprises because we don’t have time to enumerate all the details, logic, or motivations behind what we or others express. Daily life in a crowd is a matter of filling in the gaps and surmising.
Fortunately, for much of our communication, we get by with partial meanings. “I understand what you mean” we say, without, of course, any substantial proof that we truly understand. On occasion—and maybe more so because of social media than ever before—partial statements lead to large and potentially tragic misunderstandings. Unlike those ancient stone-tablet inscribers whose broken tablets and long-lost letters can only be surmised, we don’t have to speak or write elliptically on some social media platform, but many of us do. It is the nature of our times to be brief, to be Sesame-Street-like, giving a letter for a few seconds before going on to something else to satisfy our short attention spans.
Strange, isn’t it? Those ancient stone tablet inscribers probably spent a day or two just writing a few sentences or paragraphs. We, with our hair-trigger keyboards and text-correcting computer software, can produce much more in a shorter time but often choose to write much less. We leave enough gaps to keep “epigraphers” and translators busy into a future so distant that our writings will be ancient when they try to piece together our meanings.
The problem with our constant use of social media is that we can’t do much more than to write aphoristically. And aphorisms, like the proclamations spoken by Pythia at Delphi and the title To Serve Man, are easily assigned multiple meanings.
Our big brains, multiple experiences, and restlessness make our intellectual verbal legacies elliptical. We’re walking ellipsis marks. Because we can’t “say it all,” we are gap-makers extraordinaire. Unfortunately, at key times in our personal lives, we and others have mistakenly filled in those gaps with the wrong letters, the wrong words, or the wrong meanings with dire, near-dire, or just plain embarrassing consequences.***
Consider the gaps you fill in when you interpret what others say. Consider, also, the gaps you ask others to fill in when they interpret what you say.
*Deepmind. Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy. Published on ARXIV, 15 Oct 2019. Online at https://deepmind.com/research/publications/Restoring-ancient-text-using-deep-learning-a-case-study-on-Greek-epigraphy Accessed October 21, 2019.
And Cohen, Nancy. Techxplore.com. Deep learning enlightens scholars puzzling over ancient texts. Online at https://techxplore.com/news/2019-10-deep-enlightens-scholars-puzzling-ancient.html Accessed October 21, 2019.
** One of the most infamous of misinterpretations lay in the use of the Japanese word mokusatsu during World War II, a word used by Kantarō Suzuki to dismiss the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration that was misunderstood in English translation, supposedly taken as “We are treating your message with contempt” though it meant, rather, “We withhold comment” or “ignore.” The mistranslation might have partially motivated President Truman to unleash the atomic bombs.
***A less destructive, but embarrassing, misinterpretation occurred when the translator Steven Seymour told the Poles that Jimmy Carter had a desire to abandon his own nation and to grab their private parts. Time. Top 10 Embarrassing Diplomatic Moments. Online at http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1880208_1880218_1880227,00.html Accessed October 21, 2019; http://translatorthoughts.com/2014/04/the-most-famous-examples-of-misinterpretation/ Accessed October 21, 2019; http://www.strangehistory.net/2013/12/21/carter-poland-and-the-translator/ Accessed October 21, 2019.
Pythia, the AI developed by Thea Sommerschield, Johnathan Prag, and Yannis Assael, can rapidly fill in missing letters of ancient damaged stone-tablet inscriptions. Like its Greek namesake, Pythia doesn’t necessarily give an exact rendering, but rather a set of possible letters and words. Like the misunderstood oracle that led to Greek tragedies for people like Laius, Oedipus, and Jocasta, the modern Pythia can also be misinterpreted because it provides a list of possible letters and words from which a human has to reconstruct the original.
It’s like playing Wheel of Fortune with a computer at your side. You might not get all the letters, but you can make a really good guess on the best possible fit of letters provided by the computer. Of course, even if you can put in the proper letters, you might miss the meaning as the characters missed the meaning of “to serve man” or as in the famous misinterpretation of a Japanese word mokusatsu during World War II.**
Actually, we could all use a Pythia to tell us what an Apollo wants to say. It seems that we frequently misinterpret or misunderstand one another or often speak or write elliptically. Social beings that we are, we’re constantly involved in expressing or in understanding, both of which are flawed enterprises because we don’t have time to enumerate all the details, logic, or motivations behind what we or others express. Daily life in a crowd is a matter of filling in the gaps and surmising.
Fortunately, for much of our communication, we get by with partial meanings. “I understand what you mean” we say, without, of course, any substantial proof that we truly understand. On occasion—and maybe more so because of social media than ever before—partial statements lead to large and potentially tragic misunderstandings. Unlike those ancient stone-tablet inscribers whose broken tablets and long-lost letters can only be surmised, we don’t have to speak or write elliptically on some social media platform, but many of us do. It is the nature of our times to be brief, to be Sesame-Street-like, giving a letter for a few seconds before going on to something else to satisfy our short attention spans.
Strange, isn’t it? Those ancient stone tablet inscribers probably spent a day or two just writing a few sentences or paragraphs. We, with our hair-trigger keyboards and text-correcting computer software, can produce much more in a shorter time but often choose to write much less. We leave enough gaps to keep “epigraphers” and translators busy into a future so distant that our writings will be ancient when they try to piece together our meanings.
The problem with our constant use of social media is that we can’t do much more than to write aphoristically. And aphorisms, like the proclamations spoken by Pythia at Delphi and the title To Serve Man, are easily assigned multiple meanings.
Our big brains, multiple experiences, and restlessness make our intellectual verbal legacies elliptical. We’re walking ellipsis marks. Because we can’t “say it all,” we are gap-makers extraordinaire. Unfortunately, at key times in our personal lives, we and others have mistakenly filled in those gaps with the wrong letters, the wrong words, or the wrong meanings with dire, near-dire, or just plain embarrassing consequences.***
Consider the gaps you fill in when you interpret what others say. Consider, also, the gaps you ask others to fill in when they interpret what you say.
*Deepmind. Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy. Published on ARXIV, 15 Oct 2019. Online at https://deepmind.com/research/publications/Restoring-ancient-text-using-deep-learning-a-case-study-on-Greek-epigraphy Accessed October 21, 2019.
And Cohen, Nancy. Techxplore.com. Deep learning enlightens scholars puzzling over ancient texts. Online at https://techxplore.com/news/2019-10-deep-enlightens-scholars-puzzling-ancient.html Accessed October 21, 2019.
** One of the most infamous of misinterpretations lay in the use of the Japanese word mokusatsu during World War II, a word used by Kantarō Suzuki to dismiss the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration that was misunderstood in English translation, supposedly taken as “We are treating your message with contempt” though it meant, rather, “We withhold comment” or “ignore.” The mistranslation might have partially motivated President Truman to unleash the atomic bombs.
***A less destructive, but embarrassing, misinterpretation occurred when the translator Steven Seymour told the Poles that Jimmy Carter had a desire to abandon his own nation and to grab their private parts. Time. Top 10 Embarrassing Diplomatic Moments. Online at http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1880208_1880218_1880227,00.html Accessed October 21, 2019; http://translatorthoughts.com/2014/04/the-most-famous-examples-of-misinterpretation/ Accessed October 21, 2019; http://www.strangehistory.net/2013/12/21/carter-poland-and-the-translator/ Accessed October 21, 2019.
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