13
If Goldwasser was remembered for nothing else, Macintosh once told Rowe, he would be remembered for his invention of UHL.
UHL was Unit Headline Language, and it consisted of a comprehensive lexicon of all the multi-purpose monosyllables used by headline-writers. Goldwasser’s insight had been to see that if the grammar of ‘ban,’ ‘dash,’ ‘fear,’ and the rest was ambiguous they could be used in almost any order to make a sentence, and that if they could be used in almost any order to make a sentence they could be easily randomised. Here then was one easy way in which a computer could find material for an automated newspaper – put together a headline in basic UHL first and then fit the story to it.
UHL, Goldwasser quickly realised, was an ideal answer to the problem of making a story run from day to day in an automated paper. Say, for example, that the randomiser turned up:
STRIKE THREAT
By adding one unit at random to the formula each day the story could go:
STRIKE THREAT BID
STRIKE THREAT PROBE
STRIKE THREAT PLEA
And so on. Or the units could be added cumulatively:
STRIKE THREAT PLEA
STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE
STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE
STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE SHOCK
STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE SHOCK HOPE
STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE SHOCK HOPE STORM
Or the units could be used entirely at random:
LEAK ROW LOOMS
TEST ROW LEAK
LEAK HOPE DASH BID
TEST DEAL RACE
HATE PLEA MOVE
RACE HATE PLEA MOVE DEAL
Such headlines, moreover, gave a newspaper a valuable air of dealing with serious news, and helped to dilute its obsession with the frilly-knickeredness of the world, without alarming or upsetting the customers. Goldwasser had had a survey conducted, in fact, in which 457 people were shown the headlines:
ROW HOPE MOVE FLOP
LEAK DASH SHOCK
HATE BAN BID PROBE
Asked if they thought they understood the headlines, 86.4 per cent said yes, but of these 97.3 per cent were unable to offer any explanation of what it was they had understood. With UHL, in other words, a computer could turn out a paper whose language was both soothingly familiar and yet calmingly incomprehensible.
Goldwasser sometimes looked back to the time when he had invented UHL as a lost golden age. That was before Nobbs had risen to the heights of Principal Research Assistant, and with it his beardedness and his belief in the universal matehood of man. In those days Goldwasser was newly appointed Head of his department. He had hurried eagerly to work each day in whatever clothes first came to hand in his haste. He had thought nothing of founding a new inter-language before lunch, arguing with Macintosh through the midday break, devising four news categories in the afternoon, then taking Macintosh and his new wife out to dinner, going on to a film, and finishing up playing chess with Macintosh into the small hours. In those days he had been fairly confident that he was cleverer than Macintosh. He had even been fairly confident that Macintosh had thought he was cleverer than Macintosh. In those days Macintosh had been his Principal Research Assistant.