Month: May 2014

Q: I noticed the word “operationalize” in an article about medical education in the March 20 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. But I can’t find it in my big dictionary at home, nor in my go-to computer dictionary. Is it operational?

A: The verb “operationalize” may be clunky and relatively new, but it’s a legitimate word, with roots in ancient Rome. As you’ve learned, though, not many standard dictionaries have entries for it.

One of the few dictionaries that does, the big Merriam-Webster Unabridged, defines it as “to make operational.” And Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed.), adds a second sense: to “put into operation.”

However, the verb has a very different meaning in academic and scientific writing, where to “operationalize” means to express something in measurable terms, such as mathematical symbols or operations in logic.

Because “operationalize” means one thing to ordinary people (if they’re aware of it at all) and another to scientists or academics, that usage in the medical journal is ambiguous when taken out of context.

When the authors of the article say that changes in working hours were “easier to operationalize,” they could mean (1) easier to put into effect, or (2) easier to express as a formula.

We’ve looked at the article, and the authors seem to mean #1. This more recent sense of “operationalize,” defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “to put into effect” or “to realize,” dates from the early 1980s.

Judging by citations in the OED, the term in this sense was first recorded in writing about education, then military affairs. Here are the examples:

1981:  “The head of the new … Centre for Curriculum Development, Training, and Research in Chile called upon the services of a former professor … to help operationalize and evaluate a new curriculum.” (From Connecting Worlds: A Survey of Developments in Educational Research in Latin America, by Robert G. Myers.)

1988:  “Mutual defence and mutual security were the reasons for the Philippines agreeing. … However, the MBA makes no reference to how these mutualities would be operationalised.” (From the journal the Pacific Review.)

1994:  “A number of Asian governments already had developed variants of ‘Comprehensive Security’ as a way to conceptualize, articulate, and operationalize their specific national and regional security and defence needs.” (From Canadian Defence Quarterly.)

The earlier, technical meaning of “operationalize”—to  express something in mathematical or logical terms—was first recorded in the 1950s. These examples in the OED are both from academic journals:

“No adequate methodological techniques exist for operationalizing and quantifying the characteristics themselves” (American Sociological Review, 1952).

“Attempts to operationalize the concept have met with difficulty of two opposing kinds” (Applied Linguistics, 1989).

The verb “operationalize” in all its senses was derived from the adjective “operational.” And like the verb, the adjective has meanings in both technical and everyday usage.

When “operational” was first recorded in the late 19th century, the OED says, it was a technical term meaning “of, involving, or employing mathematical operators or logical operations.”

Oxford’s earliest example is from an 1885 issue of the American Journal of Mathematics: “The forms of Boolian algebra hitherto used, have either two operational signs and a special sign of negation, or three operational signs.”

This more recent example is from a 2001 issue of the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic (2001): “It is useful to define the operational semantics of a language as a transition relation between states of an abstract machine.”

During the 20th century, “operational” came to have other meanings, in technical usage as well as in military and everyday language.

The common definition, in the words of the OED, is “in a condition of readiness to perform some intended (originally military) function; able and ready to function. Also in weakened sense: working, in use.”

All of these terms—along with words such as “operate,” “operator,” “operation,” and even “opera”—can be traced to the Latin verb operari (to work), from the noun opus (work).

As a point of interest, our word “opera” is etymologically the Latin plural of opus. In Latin, as John Ayto explains in the Dictionary of Word Origins, the noun opera “came to be regarded as a feminine singular noun meaning ‘that which is produced by work.’ ”

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Q: I was reading a business article in the New York Times about Berkshire-Hathaway’s policy of trusting managers rather than relying on a safety net of lawyers and compliance officers. At one point, the writer asks, “So is Berkshire’s approach scalable?” What on earth does “scalable” mean here?

A: We can see why you’re confused. Standard dictionaries generally define “scalable” as “climbable” or “expandable.” It can also mean “measurable” or “resizable” or “used on a large scale” or “used by many people.”

None of those definitions seem right here. For example, it’s already used on a large scale and by many people at Berkshire-Hathaway. The writer of that Times article is apparently using “scalable” to mean usable by other companies.

The word “scalable” first showed up in the 1500s in the climbable sense, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The dictionary’s earliest example is from Sir Thomas North’s 1579-80 translation of Plutarch’s Life of Aratus: “Without the wall the height was not so great, but that it was easily scalable with ladders.”

Although the OED describes the climbable sense of “scalable” as rare, that’s the primary meaning given in most of the standard dictionaries we’ve checked.

In the 20th century, Oxford says, the word “scalable” took on a new meaning: “able to be measured or graded according to a scale.”

The dictionary’s first example of this sense is from a 1936 issue of the journal Psychological Monographs: “A few seem common enough to be regarded as comparable from one individual to another. These might be called common or scalable traits.”

In the 1970s, the OED says, the word “scalable” took on yet another sense: “able to be changed in scale.”

The dictionary describes this sense as rare and lists only one citation, from a 1977 issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts: “Such lasers are scaleable since large volumes could be pumped uniformly.”

The OED doesn’t have any other senses of “scalable,” but Oxford Dictionaries online includes these additional definitions:

● “Able to be changed in size or scale: scalable fonts.”

● “Able to be used or produced in a range of capabilities: it is scalable across a range of systems.”

● “Able to be measured or graded according to a scale.”

The Collins English Dictionary says the term may also refer to a computer network that can “be expanded to cope with increased use.”

The Macmillan Dictionary online says it refers to computer systems, software, or technologies that “continue to work well when they are used on a large scale or by many people.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) offers this definition: “capable of being easily expanded or upgraded on demand: a scalable computer network.”

A bit of googling finds the word used in many other senses, but we’ll stop here. Our heads are spinning.

With so many meanings, “scalable” is becoming meaningless, especially to an everyday reader unfamiliar with its jargony senses. Perhaps it’s time for the mainstream news media to give “scalable” a rest.

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Q: I was reading that scene in Tess of the D’Urbervilles where the newlywed Tess suggests to her husband, Angel, that they separate because a rape in her past may “somewhen” come between them. Why did “somewhen” fall out of favor while “somewhere,” “sometime,” and “somehow” survived?

A: You can find the adverb “somewhen” in some contemporary dictionaries, but it’s one of those words that never quite caught on. It’s out there, but you find it mostly in 19th-century literature.

Pat came across it for the first time in another Victorian novel she read two or three years ago. Here’s the passage, from George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879):

“ ‘I’ll debate on it with Willoughby.’ ‘This afternoon?’ ‘Somewhen, before the dinner-bell. I cannot tie myself to the minute-hand of the clock, my dear child.’ ”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “somewhen” as meaning “at some (indefinite or unknown) time; sometime or other.”

Most standard dictionaries don’t have entries for “somewhen,” even those that include such archaic words as “somewise” and “somewhither.” (More about those later.)

There are exceptions, however. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), the big Merriam-Webster Unabridged, and the Collins English Dictionary all have entries for “somewhen.”

The dictionaries define it more or less similarly: “sometime,” “at some time or other,” “at some indefinite or unknown time,” etc.

If people rarely use “somewhen” today, that’s probably because they prefer “sometime,” which means the same thing. When they do produce a “somewhen,” it’s nearly always used semi-humorously or for deliberate effect.

“Somewhen” was first recorded in the late 13th century, according to OED citations. But that early usage (spelled “somwanne”) appears to be an oddity, since the word then dropped out of sight for almost six hundred years.

The word next showed up in the 1800s. And then, as the Oxford editors explain, “somewhen” became a common 19th-century term, usually “coupled with somewhere or somehow.”

The earliest 19th-century example we’ve found in our own searches is from 1827, when the English author Caroline Fry used “somewhen” in a piece of short fiction she wrote for her monthly periodical, The Assistant of Education.

In Fry’s story, the narrator describes travelers in a coach, “engaged in such conversation as takes place between strangers, who have somewhere and somewhen performed the ceremony of introduction.”

The OED’s earliest example in modern English is from a letter written in 1833 by John Stuart Mill: “I shall write out my thoughts more at length somewhere, and somewhen, probably soon.”

The fact that Mill used italics for the “when” indicates that he didn’t consider this an ordinary compound but rather a droll variation on “somewhere.”

This OED citation, from Charles Kingsley’s novel The Water-Babies (1863), also uses “somewhen” alongside similar compounds: “Some folks can’t help hoping … that they may have another chance, to make things fair and even, somewhere, somewhen, somehow.”

And this one, from William Dwight Whitney’s The Life and Growth of Language (1875), does the same: “Spoken somewhere and somewhen in the past.”

In our own searches of various databases, nearly all the examples we found paired “somewhen” with similar words.

William James spun out the longest thread we came across: “somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen” (from his essay “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” 1898).

Only rarely is “somewhen” used alone instead of alongside another “some-” word. The OED has these examples:

“… till somewhen about next Wednesday” (from a letter written in 1876 by Edward A. Freeman); and “ “Somewhen about 50,000 years ago” (from H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History, rev. ed., 1920).

We came up with only a handful of other examples with “somewhen” standing alone, as it does here:

“Somewhen around 1626-33 settlers began to repeople the lower valley” (from an article by Charles Edgar Gilliam in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 1942).

And this example from a scholarly study by three German doctors appeared in the journal Ophthalmic Research (2011):

“Patients in Cologne who had taken canthaxanthin somewhen between December 1983 and March 1988 were recruited via a newspaper article.”

Otherwise, our contemporary sightings of “somewhen” generally used it in tandem with other “some-” words.

Our findings also consisted largely of usages that were either semi-humorous, deliberately quaint, or used for effect (especially in articles about time travel). Here’s what we mean:

“Of course, I’d bought the plants days before I knew it was Earth Day, but I tend to buy plants then have to find somewhere or somewhen to plant them” (from the Daytona Beach News-Journal, 2005).

“The wormhole time machine makes complete sense. You’d jump through the wormhole and you come out not only somewhere else, but somewhen else” (from the Globe and Mail of Toronto, 2002).

Incidentally, “somewhen” isn’t the only English compound that’s become a rare bird. “Anywhen” (at any time) and “nowhen” (at no time) were once part of the language too.

We can’t sign off without mentioning some of the other antiquities that have vanished from common usage.

“Any” compounds: “anywhat” (any thing or amount); “anywhence” (from anywhere); “anywhither” (to any place); “anywhy” (for any reason); “anywise” (in any way).

“Every” and “ere” compounds: “everyhow” (in every way); “everywhen” (at all times); “everywhence” (from every direction); “everywhither” (in every direction); “erewhile” (some time ago); “erelong” (before long); “ereward” (previously).

“No” compounds: “nowhat” (nothing, or not at all); “nowhence” (from no place); “nowhy” (for no reason); “nowhither” (to no place); “nowise” (in no way).

“Other” compounds: “othersome” (some others); “otherward” (in another direction); “otherwhat” (something else); “otherwhence” (from elsewhere); “otherwhere” (elsewhere); “otherwhither” (to another place); “otherwhile” (at times, or at another time).

“Some” compounds: “somewhence” (from some place); “somewhither” (in some direction, or to some place);  “somewho” (some person); “somewhy” (for some reason); “somewhile” (formerly); “somewise” (in some way).

We’ll end with this example from Robert Browning’s 1864 poem “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium’ ”: Out of the drift of facts, whereby you learn / What someone was, somewhere, somewhen, somewhy?”

[Update: A reader in the UK writes on Oct. 3, 2022, to say that even today “somewhen” remains in use as a stand-alone adverb: “It is still in common usage on its own, on the Isle of Wight, England.”]

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Q: Please settle an argument.  A friend (who is usually my first point of call for any grammatical queries) recently wrote, “If she’s as much like I as methinks she is.”  I suggested this should be “If she’s as much like me as I think she is.” The argument has now spread to three continents with me (or I) very much in the minority. I will abide by your judgment.  Unless it goes against me, in which case I will remain silent!

A: Both of you are partly right.

You’re correct to suggest that your friend should have written “as much like me.” But your friend is perfectly within her rights to use “methinks,” which is a very old construction, a mashup roughly meaning “it seems to me.”

So what she ought to have written is “If she’s as much like me as methinks she is.”

“Methinks” (past tense “methought”) is a very old “syntactic collocation” (in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary) that’s still occasionally used in a poetic or deliberately archaic way.

It dates back to early Old English, when it was recorded in the writings of King Aelfred. A similar formation meaning the same thing, “meseems,” appeared several hundred years later, around 1400, but it was never as popular as “methinks.”

Shakespeare must have been very fond of “methinks.” He used it at least 150 times in his plays and sonnets, according to searches of Shakespearean databases.

A few examples: “The lady protests too much, methinks” (Hamlet); “O, look! methinks I see my cousin’s ghost” (Romeo and Juliet); “This night methinks is but the daylight sick” (The Merchant of Venice).

The word (and it is regarded as a single word) persisted long after the Elizabethans. The OED has many examples, including some from 20th-century literature. Here’s a sampling:

“Methinks a strait canal is as rational at least as a mæandring bridge.” (From Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England, 1780.)

“Methinks a person of delicate individuality … could never endure to lie buried near Shakespeare.” (From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s essay collection Our Old Home, 1863.)

“Anne, methinks I see the traces of tears.” (From Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel Anne of Green Gables, 1908.)

“They are only jealous, methinks.” (From Mavis Nicholson’s memoir Martha Jane and Me, 1992.)

Nothing wrong with using a quaint old antiquity, even if you’re not reciting Shakespeare.

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Q: How do you feel about the use of “kids” instead of “children”? It upsets me, especially when the context is serious, as in how many “kids” were killed in some incident. It almost seems as if “children” is going out of fashion.

A: You don’t have to worry about the fate of “children.” Both “kids” and “children” are alive and well, with billions of hits each in Google searches.

We use the two words a lot on our blog (232 hits for “children,” 135 for “kids”), but we agree with you that “kids” may be out of place in serious or formal contexts.

Why, you may ask, does “kids” show up so often on a relatively serious blog like ours? Well, we try to keep our writing casual here, even when we deal with scholarly issues of language.

Half of the eight standard dictionaries we’ve checked describe “kid” as informal when used to mean a child. Even the dictionaries that don’t use that label generally illustrate the usage with informal examples.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes the use of “kid” for “a child, esp. a young child” as slang. However, the OED cautions that its entry for “kid” was first published in 1901 and “has not yet been fully updated.”

When the noun “kid” showed up in Middle English around 1200, it referred to a young goat, a sense that it still has.

The OED says English adopted the word from a Scandinavian source (in Old Icelandic, for example, a kidh was a young goat).

The earliest example of the word in the dictionary is from the Ormulum, a collection of homilies explaining biblical texts. The OED dates it at around 1200, but adds a question mark. Other sources say it was written sometime before 1200.

Here’s the citation, which was transcribed by the lexicographer R. W. Burchfield: “the firrste callf. the firrste lamb. the firrste kide. & swillke” (we’ve replaced the letter thorn here with “th”; swillke meant “such”).

Oxford says the use of “kid” for a human child showed up in the 1600s. The dictionary adds that it was “originally low slang, but by the 19th c. frequent in familiar speech.”

The earliest OED example of the new usage is from The Old Law, a tragicomedy by Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, and Philip Massinger: “Ime old you say / Yes parlous old Kidds and you mark me well.”

(The play was published in 1656, but it’s believed to have been written several decades earlier.)

The next example is from Collin’s Walk Through London and Westminster, a 1690 poem by Thomas D’Urfey: “And at her Back a Kid that cry’d, / Still as she pinch’d it, fast was ty’d.”

In the late 1800s, the noun “kid” came to be used colloquially to mean a young man or woman.

And here’s a 20th-century example, from The Brass Cupcake, a 1950 novel by John D. Macdonald: “I spoke out of the corner of my mouth. ‘We can’t talk here, kid.’ ”

When the verb showed up in the early 15th century, it meant to give birth to goats—in the words of the OED, to “bring forth a kid or kids.”

The dictionary’s first example is from The Master of Game (circa 1425), by Edward, Duke of York: “Men shulde leue hem þe femels … into þe tyme þat þei haue kiddede.”

About four centuries later, the verb came to mean to “hoax, humbug, try to make (one) believe what is not true,” according to the OED.

The first Oxford example is from Lexicon Balatronicum: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pick Pocket Eloquence (1811), by Francis Grose and Hewson Clarke:

“Kid, to coax or wheedle … To amuse a man or divert his attention while another robs him.”

The earliest example in the OED for the verb used in the sense of to joke with or tease is from George Bernard Shaw’s 1903 play Man and Superman: “Garn! youre kiddin.”

And here’s an example from the play that we’ve found: “Garn! You know why. Course it’s not my business; but you neednt start kiddin me about it.”

Both comments are by Henry (or, as he’d say, ’Enry) Straker, the cockney-speaking chauffeur in the play.

[Note: This post was updated on Jan 31, 2017.]

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Q: A recent article in the NY Times says northeastern Nigeria “has been rived for years by attacks from Boko Haram.” Shouldn’t that be “riven”?

A: In that May 6, 2014, article in the Times about the kidnapping of schoolgirls by the terrorist group, the reporter paraphrased a comment by a UN official:

“Manuel Fontaine, Unicef’s regional director for West and Central Africa, said in a telephone interview that the information had been obtained from the agency’s contacts for the area, which has been rived for years by attacks from Boko Haram.”

Is this use of “rived” as a past participle OK? It depends.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the past participle of the verb “rive” is “riven” in British English, but it’s either “riven” or “rived” in American English.

Standard dictionaries in the US generally list “riven” as the usual past participle, but include “rived” as a less common usage.

Information in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), for example, indicates that the use of “rived” as a past participle is a “standard usage” that “occurs appreciably less often” than “riven.”

A search of the New York Times archive finds that both “riven” and “rived” are used as past participles, though “riven” is far more common at the paper.

The verb “rive,” meaning to tear apart or split, first showed up in The Chronicles of Britain, a Middle English poem written in the late 12th or early 13th centuries by the poet-priest Layamon, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

Chambers says English borrowed the term from Scandinavian sources (in Old Icelandic, for instance, rifa meant to tear apart), but it ultimately comes from an ancient Indo-European root that also gave English the word “rift.”

The OED says the verb “rive” is now “somewhat” archaic or literary in standard English, except when used for splitting people into opposing sides, or (in the US) splitting wood or stone.

Here’s an example of the divisive usage from the Sept. 22, 1998, issue of the Guardian: “The avenging, evangelical prosecutor seems never to give a thought to how his relentless chase is riving the nation.”

And here’s an example about wood being split, from the June 1991 issue of the American Woodworker: “The ax rives the wood by following the grain.”

Finally, the adjective “riven,” which showed up in the early 1300s, is still being divisive, as in this example from The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain, a 1999 brook by David Cannadine: “The image of Ireland as a riven society was no less misleading.”

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Q: Why isn’t one wisteria a wisterium? Did the Romans ever refer to a single wisteria plant as a wisterium?

A: The ancient Romans may have never seen the flowering vine, since the various species of the genus Wisteria are native to the US, China, Japan, and Korea.

In fact, the letter “w” didn’t even exist in classical Latin. The Romans used the consonant “v” or the vowel “u” in writing to represent the “w” sound. There was no “v” sound in classical Latin.

The English botanist Thomas Nuttall named the genus Wisteria in 1818 in memory of Caspar Wistar, an American professor of anatomy who died that year.

So why did he spell it Wisteria, not Wistaria?

An editor’s note in the July 1898 issue of Meehan’s Monthly Magazine, a horticultural journal, says Charles J. Wister, a friend of Nuttall and a relative of Wistar, once asked the botanist to explain the spelling of the genus.

Wister, an amateur botanist, called Nuttall’s “attention to the fact of his having named the plant in honor of the eminent professor, notwithstanding that he spelled his name with an a,” according to this account.

“Nuttall said that he was quite aware of that, but since the families of Wistar and Wister were one, and that Wisteria was more euphonious than Wistaria, he had preferred and adopted the former,” the editor’s note concluded.

The magazine gave only “a subscriber” as the source. Wister, who died in 1865, wrote a memoir, but we haven’t been able to find a full-text version online.

Although the common name of the plant is sometimes spelled “wistaria,” the genus is listed as Wisteria in the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature.

Nevertheless, the earliest example of the plant’s name in the Oxford English Dictionary uses the “wistaria” spelling.

Here’s the citation, from The Suburban Horticulturist, an 1842 book by John Claudius Loudon: “Vines, roses, Wistarias, or other luxuriant climbers.”

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Q: Here in the Washington area a lot of words seem to be created for government use only. Just on a lark, I tried several years ago to create one myself and inject it into the language. Have you ever heard “logisticate” used anywhere?

A: No, we haven’t heard it used, but we’ve had a fair number of sightings since your question arrived in our inbox and we began looking into the usage.

You won’t find “logisticate” in standard dictionaries—we checked eight of them and drew a blank. Nor will you find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, the largest dictionary of the English language.

However, “logisticate” is out in the ether—barely. We googled it and got 19,300 hits, but  the number shrank to 118 when we actually began clicking on them. (Whassup with that, Google?)

You didn’t mention when you first thought of the word and how you tried to spread it. But “logisticate” has been around for more than seven years, and perhaps longer.

The earliest example we’ve found  is from the online Merriam-Webster Open Dictionary, which lets readers submit new words for consideration by the M-W editors.

A Dec. 4, 2006, submission from a reader in the UK suggested “logisticate” and offered this definition:

“To think about or discuss the problems of moving materials or the details of a problem and how to solve it. To rethink etc would therefore be to relogisticate.”

The same contributor reported a June 2004 sighting of “relogisticate,” but we haven’t been able to confirm it.

The M-W Open Dictionary also has a July 1, 2006, entry from an anonymous contributor for “logisticize,” which is defined as “To organize the logistics of (an occasion). To plan (as a trip, party, or major event).”

The entry includes this example: “We have so many events to logisticize this year that my siblings with the planning gene will be in ecstasy.”

A Sept. 25, 2008, contribution to Urban Dictionary, another reference that relies on user-submitted entries, defines “logisticate” this way: “to provide the vision and overall direction for a task that will be completed by other people.”

The entry includes this example: “The Laundry will be picked up, sorted, pretreated, washed, dried, folded, pressed, hung and then delivered same day as per your wishes, but I’ll be sure to check in with the team ahead of time to logisticate.”

Urban Dictionary also has a reader-submitted Nov. 30, 2010, entry for “logisticize,” with this definition: “To work out details or a schedule; to make a plan in detail; to finalize the logistics of an appointment, a meeting or an engagement.”

The entry has two examples: “There will be a big crowd at the concert, so we’d better logisticize” … “Let’s logisticize now, so there’s no confusion later.”

Both “logisticate” and “logisticize” are mushy and formless, in our opinion. If a word has too many interpretations, and if others do the job better, what’s the point in using it?

In a Feb. 16, 2010, blog post about business jargon, the CNBC reporter Jane Wells condemns “logisticate” as the “worst violation of sane speech I’ve heard.”

“Readers, let’s stop the madness,” she writes. “Going forward, let’s effort to logisticate a path to sanity. Next time someone talks to you in such a manner, say, ‘Excuse me, but you could speak English?’ ”

Well, she got that off her chest. We don’t particularly like bizspeak, but we suspect that “logisticate” may already be past its sell-by date.

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