As noticed on sundry occasions, I have been reading 'David Copperfield' and have now finished.
An important character in this story is a lady known by her family name of Peggotty, who acts as housekeeper to various households with which the hero is involved. She is also devoted to him, having known him from birth. Her brother, known as Mr. Peggotty, is an even more important character.
Having got to the end, I remembered about the curious phrases Dickens had used for what I took to be Peggotty's needlewoman's tape measure, and thought to check the matter out.
Turning the pages - there are getting on for 800 of them - failed to turn anything up, so feeling a little lazy, I thought I would ask Gemini, as per the snap above. The legibility of which would be improved if the opening 'Prompted' were replaced by 'Your prompt:' or something of that sort.
I had found that my memory was not holding the detail as well as it might as I worked my way through the 800 pages, but I thought, nevertheless, that the phrase in question was 'box rule' , 'house rule' or something of that sort, that is to say a ruler or tape which lived in a little box, quite possibly china and ornamental, not to say whimsical. A thought, with hindsight, that seems a bit wide of the mark, but it was the thought at the time.
In response to my prompt, Gemini came up with some nice paragraphs agreeing with me and explaining how they fitted in with the tone and tenor of the book as a whole.
Not quite satisfied, I went downstairs to consult OED. Nothing under house, box, rule or tape. I ask Gemini if he can supply references in the text. Which he can't, but he does make some sensible suggestions about how I might set about finding them.
Fairly quickly, I am in a searchable html version of the text from Gutenburg. Search for 'tape measure' gets nothing. Search for 'Peggotty' gets around a hit a page; far too many to be helpful. Search for 'Pegotty's' does much better, and I skip through those fast enough to find that the phrase I want is 'yard-measure', sometimes qualified by it being in a little house, once further qualified by this little house having a thatched roof - this last being the example cited by OED, in which I have by now found the right place.
So while Gemini certainly helped and was good at being interestingly chatty, he also gave the impression of having knowledge of the facts that he did not have - and getting those facts wrong by agreeing with my facts. All part of his his habit of putting too much weight on the prompt, assuming that the prompter knows what he or she is talking about. Or to put it another way, keener on getting along with his interlocutor in an easy-going sort of way that on putting him or her straight. All very human of him.
So if you want waffle, Gemini does the business. If you want facts you can rely on, not so good. But if you are in position to check the answers he gives, not so bad either. You just have to be careful to do that checking.
Noting in passing, that there are plenty of questions or problems in which coming up with the answer is the difficult bit. Checking a candidate answer is easy enough - provided only that the number of candidates is small.
PS 1: I might say that searching the html text was impressively fast, more or less instant. The power of Edge!
PS 2: rather different is the office-ruler which Mr. Micawber makes much use of in the second half of the book: '... We found Mr. Micawber at his desk, in the turret office on the ground floor, either writing, or pretending to write, hard. The large office-ruler was stuck into his waistcoat, and was not so well concealed but that a foot or more of that instrument protruded from his bosom, like a new kind of shirt-frill...'. Rating nine mentions. I guess office rulers were important when so much of the business of an office, particularly a legal office, consisted of copying documents of one sort or another by hand. Indeed, one of the characters of Bleak House makes a living of sorts by doing just this as out-work. In the days when a clear, legible hand was taught in schools and having such a hand was a marketable commodity.
References
Reference 1: David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – 1850. In the Readers’ Digest edition.
No comments:
Post a Comment