Coordinating narratives of fear via expensive dictionaries could be "a thing"

Recently, I was very surprised to notice that my huge, library-discard 1971 dictionary has the word "Palestine" on the first line of the first column of page 2024. The land of Palestine was prominent in the news in the year 2024, after the 2023 music festival attack and then the invasion of Gaza land strip by the Mediterranean Sea, which invasion continued through the end of 2024. 

The guideword "scallion" at the top of the column has an obvious little mark on the "a" in it. "A" is the first letter of the alphabet and corresponds to the number 1:

Is the appearance of "Palestine" on the first row a mere coincidence? Could it be that the invasion of Gaza was somehow foreshadowed by a dictionary in 1971? Or was it used as some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy?

Lots of dictionary words have font typos and stray marks. They don't necessarily mean anything. But I've seen enough now to realize that I should withhold placing trust in the information gatekeepers of the publishing/printing world. 

I decided to look for pages with the same number as some important historical years and see if counting lines forwards/backwards---as per the letter values of matching letters with bumps/concavities in the guidewords--could possibly lead to refererences to significant world events. 

Possible references included a mention of the West Indies and tropical America on page 1492, a reference to a behind ("rere") account on page 1929, a reference to rewarding/requiting bad deeds on page 1945, a reference to Manila on page 1973, a reference to infection with a virus from page 2020, a reference to skin pustules on page 2022, and a reference to tropical America on page 2023. These correspond, respectively, with Columbus's discovery of the Americas in 1492, the 1929 bank runs at the start of the Great Depression, punishing Japan with 2 atomic bombs in 1945, solidifying of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, COVID, monkeypox, and the Venezuelan mass emigration. The 1492 and 1945 coincidences are especially remarkable.

I looked at page 2026 and saw the guideword marks led me to a line about a scarecrow being "a human figure set up to frighten." Our current President, Donald Trump, has got nearly every segment of the US population and Europe frightened about something by now on issues as diverse as immigration enforcement, NATO security, civil rights, inflation, freedom and good governance, etc.

Are there really people in publishing using the same edition of an authoritative dictionary to help determine and coordinate what will make headlines in future years? Corrupt, war-inciting behavior in publishing has been known to be a "thing" since "yellow journalism" got the USA into the Spanish-American War in 1898.  

This dictionary is from 1971, so any odd coincidences of world headlines, years, and page numbers after 1971 merit investigation.

Page 2002 of the dictionary deserves special scrutiny. The two guidewords and the page number all refer to the Levant and upper Mesopotamia (see photos below). That's three different references to the Middle East's Biblical lands. In 2002, the USA pushed very hard for and eventually got UN permission to attack Iraq, using arguments that with time now appear mostly unsubstantiated. If modern day "yellow journalism" (possibly coordinated via expensive dictionaries) is why we invaded Iraq, the people serving in the US military have been horribly exploited.

The tiny font deviations in the guideword lead to the line about Jacob meeting his wfe, which happened in upper Mesopotamia.

The tiny deviations in the page number 2002 lead to the bottom of the previous column...

...where there is a reference to Jesus, who lived in the Levant.

Here is the guideword over the third column. The resolution is good enough you should be able to see the mark on the letter "m".

The marks on the guideword lead to the line with "salading", a word I have never read before, which is given a pronunciation that fits Saladin, the famous 12th-century sultan over Palestine and Syria.

[Update: I was curious about what pages 2027 and 2028 might be used to prognosticate by those so inclined. Remember, this dictionary is from 1971. I don't think it's actually telling the future. But I do think that, as an authoritative edition, it might be used by people in publishing to create the appearance of a spontaneous "zeitgeist", or collective unconscious.

Page 2027 could be read to foreshadow something about scorpions. The US military does have an attack drone program called "Task Force Scorpion Strike" (TFSS) which was announced at the end of 2025 and has been deployed in Iran in 2026. 

Page 2028 points to four items that could be used as news items: "ascend" (this could refer to increased ascents into space, as well as "ascents" (i.e., migration) of Jews to Israel), a molecule including silicate and arsenite of manganese (or of a related element, such as ruthenium), "touch or by the mind" (this could refer to feeling the sensation of touch via computer interfaces that stimulate and read neural activity, which is definitely a thing now--see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58616-6), and "schalmei/schalmey/chalumeau," which looks like Chalamet, the French surname of the actor who stars in the Dune franchise and other movies. 

Is it possible that Timothée Chalamet might have risen to the top of Hollywood's young male actor roster in part due to his surname? I'm not denying his talents. Hollywood has a lot of talented, striving actors, though. Years ago on the blog Instapundit, the commenters talked about how the plaintiff in Roe vs Wade was chosen because of her last name ("roe" means "eggs").

[Update July 2, 2026: I looked again at page 2027, and I misread a word. I jumped to thinking "scorper" related to "scorpion," but it is a different word entirely. I've struck through the part of my post above that talked about page 2027.

When I looked closely at all the headings on page 2027, I saw that their typos could be pointing to "ambitious sons" whose ambitions have to be curbed, "scary," "earthquake rents," "writing," "S. Douglas," scatter/scatty/scatterbrain, "separated intervals: spread at random over a surface," and "dirt, waste, or impurities from (as a street or chemical solution)." Will there be big headlines in 2027 that relate to any of these words? We'll know within eighteen months.

For those who follow US politics, we are already seeing headlines about President Trump and his family (mostly sons) apparently using his position to make very large amounts of money (see https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-sons-face-scrutiny-over-090000697.html; https://crow.house.gov/media/press-releases/warren-crow-demand-answers-on-federal-contracts-benefiting-trump-family). And we're still six months before 2027.]

[Update July 3, 2026: I noted on page 1999 a typo-indicated term--"sagey" or "sagy"--that might have been later used as a reference to the Screen Actors Guild negotiations in the year 1999. 

There was also a typo-indicated reference to the West and a plane pilot. Sadly, 1999 was the year that John F. Kennedy's son had a mysterious plane crash while piloting a small airplane. Later in the same year, the first officer of EgyptAir flight 990, after taking off from Kennedy airport in New York City, acted erratically and suicidally crashed the passenger plane in the ocean, killing over two hundred people along with himself.]

Common crystals that generate electric currents when exposed to light

 Yesterday, I came across an interesting word in the dictionary: actinoelectric. It is an older word defined in the dictionary as "exhibiting photoconductivity." It was used in the 1920s and 1930s and then apparently fell out of use (see https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=actinoelectric&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3). 

Photoconductivity is "an optical and electrical phenomenon in which a material becomes more electrically conductive due to the absorption of electromagnetic radiation such as visible light, ultraviolet light, infrared light, or gamma radiation" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoconductivity).

However, when I looked up more information on "actinoelectric," I found out that actinoelectric materials don't just exhibit photoconductivity. They actually generate electric current when exposed to light. They are photovoltaic, too. 

And this was known as early as 1929, based on the existence of a journal article reporting light being used to generate an electromagnetic force in selenium. See Robert L. Hanson, "The Photo-emf in Selenium*," J. Opt. Soc. Am. 18, 370-382 (1929). https://opg.optica.org/viewmedia.cfm?r=1&rwjcode=josa&uri=josa-18-5-370 (no abstract available online).

Here is a 1939 study reporting generation of an electrical current in tartaric acid crystals. Grapes are high in tartaric acid, and tartaric acid crystals are contained in grape products, including wine and raisins. Tartaric acid is also high in tamarind.

Abstract: Tartaric acid crystals illuminated with light from a carbon arc exhibit a flow of current when connected to a galvanometer without the aid of an impressed battery. This actinoelectric effect is greatly dependent upon the orientation of the crystal with respect to the illuminating beam of light. It is shown that a section of the crystal can be chosen which shows a series of equi-potential lines when its surface is examined with two probes while the crystal is illuminated. The measured currents are about 10−12 ampere, when the crystal is illuminated with the light from a carbon arc. The effect is a linear function of light intensity for the lower light intensities, but increases more rapidly for higher intensities. The effect is practically independent of temperature in the range from 20°C to -40°C. The maximum spectral response is at approximately 10,500A

Brady, J.J. and Moore, W.H. Actinoelectric Effects in Tartaric Acid Crystals. Phys. Rev. 55, 308. Published 1 February, 1939. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.55.308

We have this idea that photovoltaic materials have to be expensive components in solar panels and the like. But if everyday items like crystals in raisins and tamarind, when exposed to the right kind of light at the needed angles, can generate electromagnetic fields in the human body, that is something we should know and use, given how many functions of our bodies are connected to electromagnetism.

Perhaps one of the reasons we enjoy certain kinds of chandeliers and light fixtures more than other kinds is connected to whether they produce light in desirable wavelengths for crystals in our eyes and skin. A lot of women tan (i.e., lay in the sun or a tanning bed) because it makes them feel good.

A cute little Austrian flag "Easter egg" in the LIFE commemorative issue about 60 years of the Sound of Music

Looking over my past posts, it's clear that I went from totally oblivious about hidden things in printed material to surprised, shocked, a bit angry, and then energetically suspicious of every possible word puzzle or typo that might have improper/immoral/illegal significance. I don't know why I was so completely oblivious to Easter eggs in printed materials before. They don't seem to be a secret to anyone who is already aware of them.

I asked Google AI if there are Easter eggs put in by editors and printers and got this reply (I copied and pasted it exactly as Google AI gave it to me):

Yes, Easter eggs are frequently placed in books and documents by editors, designers, and printers. While famously common in video games and software, the long history of publishing is filled with hidden messages, inside jokes, and typographic quirks left by the people who put books and media together. [1, 2, 3]

How Editors and Authors Hide Messages

• Acrostics and Ciphers: Authors and their editors have a long tradition of embedding hidden words. Lewis Carroll embedded an acrostic poem at the end of Through the Looking-Glass that spells out "Alice Pleasance Liddell," the real-life inspiration for Alice in Wonderland. [1]
• Editorial Grudges: In the pulp fiction world, one author retaliated against an editor who constantly misspelled a character name ("Fredo" instead of "Frodo") by explicitly writing "Frodo Baggins" as a random, awkward bystander in the story. [1]
• Typographical Quirks: In the digital age, Columbia University researchers even developed "FontCode," a method that allows designers to alter the shape of letters imperceptibly, effectively hiding secret messages or copyright information inside ordinary paragraphs. [1]

The Secret World of Printers

• Printers' Marks: In the early days of the printing press, compositors and printers often hid tiny caricatures of themselves, initials, or playful crests within their traditional printers' marks. [1]
• The Devil’s Tail: The manual lever used by historic pressmen to press paper to type was known as the "devil's tail." Many printers embraced this folklore and playfully inked hidden "typographical devils" or unassociated images in the margins of heavily printed books. [1]
• Tracking Dots: While not a whimsical Easter egg, most modern color laser printers print nearly invisible microscopic yellow dots onto every page. These function as a government-mandated security mark that identifies the specific printer's serial number and the date and time of the printout. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

For an entertaining look into the history of publishing, irrepressible printing errors, and the behind-the-scenes lives of the people who operated printing presses, you can read the historical overview provided by ⁠Printer's Error. [1]

Two days ago, I read the LIFE commemorative issue printed in 2025 about The Sound of Music. It's called "The Sound of Music: 60 Years Later, the Hills are Still Alive." The magazine reiterated that one of the truly accurate things about the Broadway musical and the Julie Andrews movie is that the real Captain Baron von Trapp refused to fly the Nazi flag.

Page 18 of the book has a really obvious, unusual typo. I'll give you the page first and let you look for it (I did edit the photo a little so that it didn't get tagged as having offensive images, but I did nothing to the text):

Did you see it? Here's a photo of the part with the extra printer mark:

Isn't that cute? It's a little flag waving on the letter "i" in Vienna! The Austrian flag is two horizontal red stripes with a white stripe running between, so I think this is meant to be the Austrian flag, rendered in black and white just like the old photo directly above it.

My grandfather was actually interned by the US government during World War II as a suspected Nazi, but my family, as far as I know, has always been loyal to the USA and not in sympathy with persecution of minorities (although there is that one uncle....we all have black sheep in our families.)