#plash

Here for the Clash x Pocket content

Might colour it?

@conlontwins

Yuuri: B-but Victor I don't know how.

Victor: Ofc you can. You drive me crazy every night.

Yuuri:

This will be the final post for a little more than a week – until about July 6 – as I’ll be on the road going here and there.

For today, I have a bit of an odd post, and it has to do with an AI-generated response to a question I posed to Google yesterday.

Yesterday’s post centered on Dickinson’s poem “The night was wide, and furnished scant.” The third stanza of that poem reads “No Squirrel went abroad / A Dog's belated feet / Like intermittent Plush, be heard / Adown the empty street.”

In a letter to Mabel Loomis Todd about the third line in that stanza, Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote, “I had altered ‘Like intermittent plush’ to ‘In intermittent plash,’ thinking it must be plash – but as you say it is not, I have altered it back to your reading.”

When I came across that letter, I googled something like “When was Dickinson’s poem ‘The night was wide, and furnished scant’ first published?” I wanted to see where Todd and Higginson landed with that poem – did they print it with “plash” or with “plush.”

Here’s the answer I got back in the way of a Google AI overview:​

“The night was wide, and furnished scant’ is a poem by Emily Dickinson, and it was first published in 1896 in the first volume of her collected works, titled ‘Poems by Emily Dickinson.’ It was written six years earlier, in 1863.”

Of course, there are various things wrong with that response, and the first and most obvious one is that “six years earlier” than 1896 is not 1863 – that would be 1890.

The second error is not one that most readers would pick up on – and that is that the first volume of “Poems by Emily Dickinson” was not published in 1896; the first volume was published in 1890.

The third error took a bit of research. I knew that the poem could NOT have been published in the first volume from 1890 because the letter from Higginson to Todd was dated August 1891. Therefore, I checked the “second series” of poems published in 1891, and voila – there it was.