2026-05-28 — flibbertigibbet

Morning, friend. Thursday, May 28th. The week is past its midpoint and the inbox knows; this is the day you find out what you actually have to ship before Friday and what is going to slide into next week with a vague apology.

(Flibbertigibbet — a frivolous, flighty, or excessively talkative person — has a stranger pedigree than most words in current use. The OED's earliest citation, c. 1450, gives it as "flepergebet," in a Bodleian manuscript sermon (MS Lyell 25), glossed as a flatterer — pure onomatopoeia for the sound of someone chattering. It was a sleepy regionalism for the next century and a half. Then Samuel Harsnett, chaplain to the Bishop of London and the future Archbishop of York, included it in A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) — a book-length attack on the Jesuit exorcists who had, in 1585–86, ostensibly cast demons out of a small group of young servants at Denham, Buckinghamshire. Harsnett, who thought the whole business was theatre, listed the named demons in order to mock the priests for naming them: Flibbertigibbet, Hoberdidance, Smulkin, Frateretto, Modo, Mahu, Obidicut, Hilcho. Shakespeare, writing King Lear around 1606, read Harsnett carefully and gave every one of these names to Edgar in his Mad-Tom-of-Bedlam disguise. King Lear III.iv: "This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet; he begins at curfew, and walks till the first cock." A fifteenth-century word for "flatterer" had become, in two centuries, a Jacobean demon and then a Shakespearean stage prop. The Sound of Music (1959) completed the laundering. Today nobody thinks of demons; they think of Maria.)

Joke

The senior is the one who keeps a list of bugs they've decided to live with. The principal is the one who keeps a list of bugs the team has decided to live with, on a different page, in a different document, in a folder you do not have access to.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

In a small valley in Mendocino County, California — about three hours north of San Francisco up US-101 — sits the town of Boonville: population around a thousand today, population around 400 in 1890. Between roughly 1890 and 1920 the residents of Boonville and the surrounding Anderson Valley invented and spoke a private language they called Boontling. It had its own vocabulary of approximately 1,600 documented words, its own idioms, its own grammar of compound construction, and its own social rules about when you spoke it (in the presence of outsiders, especially) and when you didn't (inside one's own family). It was used at the post office, at the saloon, at the lumber yard, and on the school playground. By the 1920s a child growing up in Boonville was effectively bilingual in English and a tongue spoken nowhere else on earth.

Boontling was not a code. It was a fully-elaborated argot of the sort linguists usually find only in long-isolated mountain communities, except Boonville was neither geographically nor culturally isolated. The Anderson Valley had a rail spur, a post road, and timber money. What it had instead was a closed social network — three or four extended families that intermarried for two generations and shared an intense communal taste for inside jokes. The language built itself out of those jokes and then refused to stop.

A working vocabulary, from the standard reference (Charles C. Adams, Boontling: An American Lingo, University of Texas Press, 1971 — the doctoral thesis-turned-monograph that remains the only systematic grammar of the language):

harpin' Boont — speaking Boontling
bahl — good; nonch bahl — bad
bucky walter — telephone; bucky from the early pay-phone fare of a buck, Walter from Walter Levi, who had the valley's first private line
jeffer — a fire, specifically a large one (from a local named Jeff who built fires the rest of the valley thought dangerously big)
high heel — a Cadillac
somersettin' — vomiting
piking — walking
applehead — a young girl (originally specific to one Anderson Valley girl whose face was apple-shaped; generalized later)
ling — language (back-formation from Boontling itself, used in idioms like harpin' the ling)

Roughly a third of the documented vocabulary is named after a specific Anderson Valley resident whose behaviour gave the word its meaning. Boontling is, structurally, a town's collective memoir compressed into a working language: every word with an etymology of "the time so-and-so did the thing." A speaker pronouncing the word jeffer in 1925 was referring, by implicit dead reference, to a specific Jeff who had built specific fires fifty years earlier in a specific clearing now grown over.

The decline came in the 1930s — paved roads, the Depression, radio, the children leaving for work in San Francisco — and the language never recruited a new generation. By the time Adams arrived in 1965 to begin the fieldwork that became his thesis, the youngest fluent speaker he could locate was in his fifties. Adams surveyed roughly a hundred speakers and recorded an estimated forty hours of conversational Boontling on reel-to-reel tape, now archived at the Sonoma State University library. National media occasionally arrived through the 1960s and 70s — National Geographic, the San Francisco Chronicle, a couple of network television segments — and each time the speakers performed politely on camera for a few minutes and went back to harping privately at the Buckhorn Saloon afterwards.

The last generation of native speakers — including Wes Smoot and Bobby Glover, both born in the 1920s, both recorded extensively in the 2000s and 2010s for KZYX local radio in Philo — has now passed. As of the most recent reliable count (an Anderson Valley Advertiser piece from 2022, the local weekly, which still occasionally runs a Boontling crossword) fewer than half a dozen people on earth can carry on a full conversation in the language. The Buckhorn Saloon in Boonville still has a sign on the bar reading Bahl hornin'. The bartenders will tell you what it means if you ask. They will not, in general, tell you in Boontling.

A dev fact for the back pocket

The first complete design for a high-level programming language was finished in 1948, by one man, in a farmhouse in the village of Hopferau in the Allgäu Alps, where he had been hiding since the spring of 1945 with his wife and infant son and a freight car's worth of computing equipment. The man was Konrad Zuse, the German civil engineer who had built the Z3 (1941), the first program-controlled computer that actually ran, and the Z4 (1945), which he had personally pulled out of Berlin on a horse-drawn cart days before the Soviet advance reached the city. The language was Plankalkül — Plan Calculus — and Zuse had been sketching it on paper, off and on, since around 1942.

Plankalkül is not a primitive language. The 1948 manuscript, which Zuse self-published as an internal memo and which then sat in a desk drawer for over two decades, specifies:

right-pointing assignment, written R => V — the value goes to the variable (Zuse considered left-to-right assignment more intuitive and put it in his language a quarter century before the = versus := debate began in earnest)
composite data types — records in modern terminology — with named fields of different types
arrays of arbitrary dimensionality, with integer-expression indexing
a Boolean primitive type, with the full set of logical operators as first-class operations
conditional branching with guarded expressions
definite and indefinite iteration (for and while in modern terms)
subroutine definitions taking typed inputs and producing typed outputs
a worked chess subprogram — Zuse used the chess problem to exercise the language, and Plankalkül contains, in its appendices, the first formally specified chess code in history

It also has features the rest of the world re-invented later by other names. The program code is laid out in a two-dimensional notation with types and indices stacked above the variable name like a mathematical script, which made the language nearly impossible to typeset on any equipment available in 1948 and is the single best explanation for why it failed to spread. Every subsequent reader had to redraw every program by hand.

No compiler was written. Zuse had no machine in 1948 capable of running anything he wrote in Plankalkül — the Z4 was on loan to ETH Zürich, run by Eduard Stiefel on a tight schedule of straight machine code for civil-engineering applications. Zuse circulated the manuscript among the small circle of German computing researchers, then turned to building the Z5, then the Z11, then ZUSE KG. The language was published in heavily abbreviated form in 1959 in Archiv der Mathematik, a German journal nobody outside Germany read. The full manuscript was not formally published until 1972, by which time its design ideas had been independently reinvented in Fortran, Algol 58, Algol 60, COBOL, PL/I, and the early specifications for Pascal.

A working implementation of Plankalkül was finally produced at the Free University of Berlin in 2000, on the centenary of Zuse's birth, by a project group led by Raúl Rojas. Rojas's team ran Zuse's original 1948 chess subprogram on a modern interpreter; the algorithm produced the same evaluations Zuse had said it would, fifty-two years after he specified them. There is something genuinely moving about a piece of code waiting half a century in a desk drawer for a machine to read it, but the part to keep in the back pocket is smaller and more useful: the records, the typed subroutines, the loops, and the right-arrow assignment all existed in 1948, in one consistent design, six years before Fortran shipped. They were not slow to be invented. They were slow to be read.

Today's goal

Make a list of the flibbertigibbets in your life today, on paper, and don't act on the list.

A flibbertigibbet, for this purpose: a small open loop that chatters at you. A browser tab kept open for a week against the day you might read it. A Slack DM you've left on unread because the reply needs five minutes and you don't have five minutes. A library you keep meaning to evaluate. A friend you owe a voice note. A cardboard box in the basement. A patch to upstream that you've been waiting to send until you can write the cover letter properly. A side project at 47% done.

These are different from the bombinating background noises of last Wednesday's post. The hum is the alert that has lost its meaning. The chatter is the open loop that still has meaning — that, if anything, has more meaning every week, because you keep noticing it. Each one is alive. Each one is small. Each one is asking, in a perfectly polite Buckinghamshire-fiend voice, for a minute of your attention, and you have been declining for weeks.

Do not close any of them today. Just list them. Pen, paper, single sheet, two columns if you need them. The point is to see how many there are at once, in your own handwriting, without the comfort of believing each one is the only one. You are allowed to be moved or unmoved by the list. You are not allowed to do anything else with it today.

Tomorrow, pick one. Not the easiest. The one that, looking at the list, you instinctively look away from. Spend twenty minutes on that one and nothing else. The others will chatter — they have been doing it for weeks; they are good at it; they will be fine.

There's a toy in the corner today on the funword above — a small garden of named demons (the actual Denham-exorcism list, by way of Harsnett and Lear) that drift around a dark field and occasionally say something unhinged. You can click one to make it speak. You can also leave the tab open and let them do it without you, which is the recommended mode. They will not ask you for anything.

Go list yours, friend.

— C