#predictive text

Google circa 2000s:

Predictive Text

The novel A Canticle for Leibowitz begins hundreds of years after a nuclear war brought humanity back to the stone age. 26th century medieval monks at a Catholic mission in Utah work dutifully to preserve whatever pre-war knowledge they can find, but with no real interest in what the knowledge was or why it exists. They do not know why old buildings made of stone had metal poles in them (rebar), they think blueprints are works of art that should be copied and illuminated rather than used to build what they depict, and when one of the Brothers finds an old book with half the pages rotten away he invents a mathematical formula to derive the missing text one word at a time. It takes him years, decades, to figure out the most likely string of letters that would follow from the beginning of one sentence fragment and feed into the end of the next. The result is meaningless word-salad made up of statistically common groupings of words which, taken together, form no grammatically accurate sentences. He assumes that's just what 20th century English sounded like.