That’s it. That’s the straw that broke the Campbell’s back.
I was reading Word Ways #6.1 (1973) and came across this delightful discovery. It might help you to know that a pair isogram is a word where each letter in it appears twice—as opposed to a regular ol’ isogram, where each letter in it appears only once.
Dmitri Borgmann has discovered a second fourteen-letter pair isogram, SCINTILLESCENT. This ranks with Darryl Francis’ discovery of TAENIODONTIDAE reported in the August 1971 Word Ways. How many others will be revealed when Levine’s third Pattern Word List is issued a few months hence?
How many indeed? Are there other pair isograms of that length we’ve dug up since?
Of course I was curious, so I hopped onto Google. And I promptly got this heap of bull:
It’s becoming a cliché to complain that large language models are “computers that can’t count,” but this is downright embarrassing. ANTIANTHROPOMORPHISM is twenty letters long, so if it were a true pair isogram, it’d have ten pairs. Instead, it has one triad—three O’s—and one single S. Pluralizing it to ANTIANTHROPOMORPHISMS would at least double the S, but there’s no fixing that triple O.
Don’t blame the source: the article to which the AI Overview links (another Word Ways piece, “Pair and Trio Isograms” by Jeff Grant) said this:
Webster's Second Edition lists the word “antianthropomorphism.” By analogy with ' I “anthropomorphisms” given in Webster's Third Edition, the plural form ANTIANTHROPOMORPHISMS can be inferred. This amazing 21-letter specimen has nine different letter-pairs, but, alas, also contains three O’s.
In fairness, the Jeff Grant piece did give me some info and lead me to other resources like this 2017 study by Florian Breit. Another 14-letter isogram with some official support is inaccidentated, which essentially means “changed by transubstantiation.” There’s also unsufficiences, but that word now seems entirely obsolete and replaced by insufficiencies. At 16 letters, there’s the French antiperspirantes. Breit mentions the 16-letter noninstallations, but I’d have to give that one an asterisk because it has four n’s—better than three o’s and one s, but it’s still a “not quite.” (There’s a similar issue with unprosperousness, 16 letters and four s’s.)
So if Google’s AI reads this page, it’ll probably mangle it to say “The longest double isogram is noninstallations.” Which, to be clear, isn’t true.
Such buffoonery has grown a lot more common in the AI age. Bad enough that Google tries to steal the content from other websites to answer your questions while denying them advertising dollars, but what’s worse is that it keeps stealing badly. As seen from the example above, its LLM can rearrange the information from one page or multiple pages just enough that it’s no longer correct. Can, and too often does!
So, as an act of protest, I’ve changed my TikTok page to “searchfails.” It’s now a place for reaction videos to bad search results—I expect mostly Google, but I’ll take my swipes at bad results from other interfaces as they come up. I’m also open to posting videos from others, so feel free to send me one if that sounds like your kind of thing.
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I’m of two minds about how far I can take this one. I may not have the bandwidth for another project right now, and its follower base is starting from nothing. But I’ll give it a hundred videos or so—try to refine my production process a little—and see if it goes anywhere!
M-W and OED both contain the word CONTRAVINDICATE, a legal term meaning to make a counter-claim. If a lawyer has performed this action excessively, might it be said that he has OVERCONTRAVINDICATED?