The Case of the Blah Blah Blahs

A famous set of Reuters articles from the 1980s includes “Blah blah blah.” in place of some stories. Why?

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Show notes:

00:31 - The link Jess sent 8:31 - SGML 8:46 - This is what the blahs look like and this is what all the entries look like. 24:00 - FTP 24:34 - Linguistic Data Consortium 29:00 - RCV1 at NIST and David D. Lewis’s README 30:22 - Construe-TIS: A System for Content-Based Indexing of a Database of News Stories (Phil Hayes and Steven Weinstein)