Is mage such a rare word? I'm surprised two people out of four didn't know it.

Sharing this with friends has revealed how many people don’t know the meaning of the word “Mage”

My favorite example of this: in the UK edition of The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot, they localized the book from American English to British English. So "pants" became "trousers" because in the UK "pants" means what we Americans would call "underpants". Unfortunately, "participants" became "particitrousers".

For anyone curious on how this came about: In the earliest versions of D&D there were only 3 classes; fighting-man, magic-user, and cleric. In Advanced Dungeons and Dragons(think of it as being D&D 1.5) this was mostly the same, but class names were simplified: Fighting-man became Fighter, Magic-user became Mage. In AD&D 2nd edition a lot more classes were added and the classes were grouped based on play style(so fighters, paladins, and rangers were all now grouped as warrior classes; and more importantly mages, illusionists, and elementalists were all grouped under Wizard). A lot of the existing mage specific logic now applied to all wizard subclasses. The book having originally been written for first edition releasing so soon after second edition dropped underwent rapid changes to fit second edition including replacing all existing references to Mage with Wizard.

This was actually a question on “Um, Actually”, speaking of dropout, also I just realised BDG now the new co host of that show

"You cut me open and I bleed 'nerd'". This here. But I would also expect everyone to know "mage" as a word.

The first thing I thought about was Hungarian notation, something like "integer wizard" and "array of double wizards"

I immediately knew it was a “clbuttic” mistake but I couldn’t figure out the specifics for most of the question

Tom Scott with BDG mentioning Dropout, the multiverse is finally connected

Somebody commented about this under Tom's "onosecond" video, which is why I immediately knew what this was about before even clicking on this.

"You cut me open, and I bleed nerd" man Hannah is the best guest

Mongoose had a similar problem with the Conan game. They did a late change to replace "pound" with "lbs." so a sentence like "..the following magical compounds are required" would become "..the following magical comlbs.s are required".

Can we talk about the fact that two of the guests didn't know the word 'mage' means 'someone who uses magic'? Is that not common knowledge? It was used in other media long before DnD.

Knew this one immediatedly from it being mentioned in a "Um actually" episode

Clbuttic!

First time I actually know some lore about these questions! The reason they went with "Mage" originally was because Mages were a separate class from Wizards in D&D 2nd edition. By the time the book was about to be published, the 3rd edition came out and basically combined the two groups back into Wizard, hence why they got replaced, hence the typos

I love how Hannah was wholly insulted that it was implied she was not a nerd

I'm enjoying the lovely shade of wizardnta in Tom's background

Ahh. A moment's thought solved this one. Years back I worked on a product called "P4AS" which was often written "PAS". Someone decided to standardize the naming convention and did a search-and-replace on the operating manual, leaving us with things like "P4ASsword" littering the document. It was never properly fixed.

Oh wow, I instantly got it. Granted I've had similar issue in previous companies I've worked at where some people blindly search and replaced strings.

Spoilers: . . . The answer reminds me of the story of someone postponing a project at Julius Baer from July to August. "July" in German is "Juli", so they ended up with a document containing lots of instances of "Augustus Baer".

I got it immediately, but it helps if you're a fan of a ton of different TTRPGs where each one uses a distinct synonym for "wizard" to come across as original.

The reason for the search and replace is that the Encyclopedia Magica was a collection of almost every magic item that had been published for D&D or AD&D by TSR. This this spanned almost two decades¹ and involved dozens of different writers, there was an effort to standardize some of the terminology used. So, anywhere an item description said things like "mage", "magic user", "sorcerer", etc., it was changed to "wizard" to match the 2ed class name. 1: IIRC there were even some items that had only been published in The Strategic Review, the short-lived magazine that preceded The Dragon.

Took me a while to realise what the relevant synonym for 'wizard' would have been, but I just knew that it was the result of a . . . . . . . . global find and replace on a text string.

the first thing that came to mind for me was an old visual novel called ever17 where somebody did a find and replace of all instances of "youth" with "kid" which made some very strange sentences since it ignored spaces turning "you there" or similar into "kidre". And then it turns out that was the exact same answer as the question 🤣

Brian is wrong about the Mage. In second edition (and in first, but I'd need to get my books from my brother's house to check), there were four archetypes to the classes: Warrior, Thief/Rogue, Mage, and Priest. Under each archetype were classes specific to that archetype. Wizard was a class under the Mage archetype, alongside Illusionists and Sorcerers. My guess whomever wrote the initial drafts used Mage instead of the specific class Wizard. Then the review saw this mistake and had them fix it. But, yes, Second Edition (including both Basic and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons variants) had Mage and Wizard in the rules.

pausing at the start to make a guess: . . they were originally "image" and "damage", but someone made a book-wide replace of the word "mage" to "wizard".

It always amazes me how some people who are incredibly smart are so specialized in what they're smart about that they don't know about some things that seem like common knowledge. I really would've expected everyone to know about mage meaning "magic user".

Bdg and tom scott working together is heaven

I didn't hit upon the "mage" bit at first (although I'm aware of the synonym, as it's also the root of magi and magic), but as soon as I saw the question, I thought "over-zealous find and replace", recalling the incident when the Midland Examining Group merged with a few others to become Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations, so someone did a gobal find and replace on their acronyms, resulting in that year's students having to deal with the new SI Units Ocrawatt and Ocrajoules in their examinations...

HA. I'd be sitting this one out, because I REMEMBER this goof. (Word processors = chaotic evil.) Editing to explain the history of this a little further... in 2nd ed. AD&D, your average, generalist magic-user was called a "mage," and that's the class that most spell-slingers played. However, 2nd ed. also introduced specialist classes of wizard (such as illusionist or necromancer) that traded variety of spell selection for more powerful spells within their specialty as they advanced, so technically, "mage" was just *one type* of "wizard." Since the book you're talking about was written for both mages (generalist wizards) and specialist wizards, "wizard" was the correct word to use, but it was an understandable slip for the writer to use "mage." The editor just didn't fully think through the consequences of that correction. :D (In 3rd edition AD&D, they scrapped "mage" entirely and just called all of them "wizards," specialist or no, so there's that.)

Knew this one immediately because I've got that book sitting on the shelf behind me, and I noticed that issue (and immediately figured out what caused it) when I bought it, at the initial release. Ugh, now I feel old... Also, now that I've gotten to Tom's explanation... it's not that Mage doesn't exist as a class in D&D. In 2nd Edition (which this was), a "Mage" was a generalist class of Wizard (as opposed to one of the various Specialist classes, like Evoker and Transmuter). So for rules clarity, they wanted to make sure that any type of Wizard could use the spells, and not only Mages, so they did the find/replace to ensure they weren't calling out Mage specifically anywhere that they shouldn't have been. Which lead to the image/iwizard and damage/dawizard issue, of course.

The lesson: Don't find and replace in a large file.

I didn't know this going in, but got it in about a minute; helps that I'm writing a homebrew D&D alternative system myself. In Second Edition AD&D, Mage was technically a group of subclasses of Wizard, there were mages that didn't specialize into any particular school of magic, and there were elemental mages that focused more on one of the classical elements than others. For example, your Necromancer and Illusionist were wizards, while your hydromancer and pyromancer were water and fire mages. Shoulf have gotten it sooner, given I played a water mage for a while back in the day.

6:27 - ARGH. Thank you for that, Tom.

I HATE HOW INGRAINED IN MY BRAIN THIS ANECDOTE IS I see 'dawizards' anywhere and this whole thing pops into my head

I didn't get it from the title, but as soon as I saw the question I knew the answer to that. Yes, I am a nerd, what gave it away?

I love that literally my first thought when seeing the question was “oh this is a ctrl f error” but it took me like 5 minutes to figure out exactly what the replacement was

This is why I always do find and replace one at a time and never use replace all. It avoids so many mistakes.

One of my favorite old stories.

"Mage" was the name of the class in 2nd edition. It was changed to "Wizard" in 3rd edition. Later, "Mage" was added back as a slightly different class (in an optional rulebook).

1st edition AD&D used "magic-user" from earlier editions, but 2nd edition used "wizard" as the category and "mage" as the class along with (the unpopular) "illusionist". The writer of Encyclopedia Magica was apparently told "Change 'mage' to 'wizard' to account for all arcane spellcasters."

I got it at about 4 and a half minutes and was yelling "clbuttic!!!" at my screen 😂It took me a while to figure out from there that the substitution was "mage" for "wizard", but I am very very aware of the clbuttic effect because I do a fair amount of text processing in my hobby work!!

I think some of the blame for this type of error has to go to Microsoft. In Word, when you open the "Find and Replace" tool, "Find whole words only" is unchecked by default, and it's not even visible unless you click "More". So if someone didn't know to look for that option, they might not even realize it's there.

i am fairly sure that either tom (in his video on scunthorpe) or some other dnd youtuber like blaine simple covered this in a video, because i knew the answer immediately

This is the first one I got immediately. Was very fun watching them work through it.

Incredible! 😄

I could absolutely listen to Hannah and Tom all day.

A colleague of mine was to play the organ for the funeral of a man named Carl. The church secretary got ill before she had printed the bulletins so producing them fell on the rector. He got the idea to just do a find and replace on the most recent document, a funeral for a woman named Grace. So he highlighted everything and put in replace “she” with “he”; replace “her” with “him”; and of course replace “Grace” with “Carl.” He didn’t look over the results. So the opening hymn was “Amazing Carl”, and the 23rd Psalm became “The Lord Is My Hephisd”. True story.

It took me a little too long to figure this one out... More so when I realized that I actually owned the second volume of the book mentioned, and came across the same error (IIRC it has a few more of a similar nature, but it was a long time ago)

I love Hannah Fry so much! "You cut me open and I bleed nerd."

There must be a tonne of similar naïve find-and-replace examples like this. But for me the one that comes to mind is one Yu-Gi-Oh video game, the text of "Dark Magician Girl" mentions the name "Dark Spellian" (instead of "Dark Magician") because they had just renamed Magic Cards to Spell Cards (due to legal issues with Magic the Gathering) so just did a find-and-replace on the word "Magic".

I can't explain it, but the Lateral background and music really just feels so wholly British, based on what television I experienced when I was over there.

I felt so smart when I figured this one out early.

I paused for a second, thought about what it must be, and laughed heartily.

I dont know where i learned this from, but i immediately remembered the replace text from mage to wizard, that was just sitting in my head dormant for this very moment

Bryan David Gilbert and Hannah Fry are some of my favorite internet people, and I just want to watch more videos of them each explaining things that the other one has no clue about. They indeed both “bleed nerd” and watching the non-overlap of Venn diagrams is fascinating.

Fun fact, Yu-Gi-Oh did something very similar in Master Duel! Waaaaay early on (and still to this day in the OCG), cards with a green border and blue orb in the corner were called Magic Cards. In the west, this ran into copyright issues because of Magic the Gathering. So, they have to change the name to Spell cards when printing cards here. In Master Duel, there are a handful of single player matches you can play against an AI deck thats themed to match the show. One of them is a Dark Magician deck. When they were translating the flavor text before the duel, they left in the text of "Dark Spellian."

As soon as Tom asked the question, I was immediately brought back to the days when I was first perusing that particular book (having been gifted it on my birthday). I was more irritated that confused. I figured that a lot of the magic items were from disparate sourcebooks and possibly even earlier editions of the game, and had used the word "mage" in their text descriptions rather than the word "wizard." Now, for those who played the 2nd Edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (which was the edition that this book was a part of), you might recall that a mage is a wizard, but not every wizard is a mage, and in the interest of allowing certain items that were restricted to mages in their text to be more accurately allowed to all wizards, TSR probably wanted to edit those descriptions. What's the fastest way to edit a large volume of material? Why, a "Find and Replace All" function (or something similar), of course! Problem is, if they replace every instance of mage with wizard, then words that have those four letters in them will also have wizard inserted in their place. Thus, image becomes iwizard and damage becomes dawizard. Image didn't occur nearly as frequently as dawizard. I was so irked, I couldn't believe the editors missed that before printing. Very sloppy. I guess I should actually watch the video and see if I was right in my supposition. ...Yep, pretty much.

finally one that i knew the full explanation for right away!

I immediately knew it was going to be find-and-replace issue because of the i- and da- prefix, but I couldn't quite get the word even though "mage" was starting me right in the face!

Got it before you finished the first readthrough of the question. LOL.

i was so excited when i just already knew the story from the first reading by tom

this is why when replacing words always include the spaces before and after, replace _mage_ with _wizard_ where "_" is spaces would leave image and damage alone

I still have those books. It always brings a smile to my lips when I see something like 6D6 points of dawizards :)

I knew this one already, which feels rare for this show.

I guessed this within 30 seconds of the question going up on screen, but probably just because I was able to see it in writing, and I've been personally burned by search and replace in documents like this before....

A power house of a cast, needs more views

I think "Mage" descends from "Magi" and "Magician", shortened and made cool.

I wasn't playing D&D at the time this happened, but the very next DM I had owned a copy of the book with iwizard and dawizard, and would show it to newbies.

Would have had to sit this one out. I had only just started playing D&D in 1994, and I wasn't aware of this issue at the time, but it is something I've known about for many years.

5 minutes in I suddenly got it. It was the word processing hint that helped

Image and damage! It only took me 20 seconds, but to be fair I am alone, and seeing the question in writing immediately made me think it was a search and replace error, just had to find the concerned words

AAA IM EATING THIS I’M ACTUALLY GOING INSANE THIS IS SO GOOD

As soon as Tom said to write it down, I did and immediately got the answer. Also, I still have a copy of that book in my closet (and I'll have to look if my printing still has that set of typos).

One of the times I know the answer upon reading the question, even before Tom is finished reading it out

My favourite item in the Encyclopedia Magicka vol 1 is The Pie of 4 and 20 Black Birds. It's an explosion of crows in a pie.

Three people I know of independently but am pleasantly surprised to see in the same place.

I knew this trivia going in, and that made this the must frustrating video I've watched in months

I know the same stuff about D&D as Hannah. I smart!

How have I only just found out Tom Scott, Hannah Fry and Brian David Gilbert did a thing together?!

Took me all of the first minute to remember this one. For those who are looking for the answer, it's because the editors used "replace all" to get rid of every instance of the word "mage" and replace it with "wizard". Being 1994, replace all wasn't very smart, and also tagged the use of "mage" in iMAGE and daMAGE.

for once i knew this answer as soon as the question was asked! hahaha very funny story

There was one DnD supplement that misspelled "free action" as "tree action", that will forever be my favorite misprint.

I really would move an eyebrow if some one told me Apple programmers or engineers are called iWizzards for real.

I've been playing long enough to remember those books, and I genuinely can't remember "iwizard" and "dawizard" at all o_O

If I remember correctly originally the only classes were **mage**, thief, Warrior and priest. Later on as more classes were added they used Mage to mean any spell caster.... btw my initial reaction without watching is iwizard is me and dawizard is an emeny wizard...

Had I still been in school I probably could have gotten this one quickly, but it’s been a few years. To combat this problem you have to put spaces on both ends of the word you are finding and the word you replace it with, that way it is only that word that is replaced and not a part of a word.

It took me a while to realise that it was a "find and replace" issue.

Finally, one I knew from the start! 😁

My fist thought was that this must be related to "clbuttic". But my knowledge of the English language did not include mage.

I'm definitely going to start rolling for dawizard on my attacks from now on.

Original class was Magic User I believe.. became Mage then the find and replace.

Its funny Tom mentioned drop out because I knew the answer because of an "Um Actually" question

Id completely forgotten avout this, but within seconds a memory from the deep corners resurfaced and I got it. Spoiler below Funnily enough, in 2e, mage is technically the right word for a non-specualized wizard. Instead of being an illusionist or an evoker, you were just a mage. A jack of all trades. This can, of course, introduce issues if you, say, have a magic sword which is supposed to work on wizards but the writer said mages

It was obviously the Bill Swerski's Superfans edition, complete with DAAA BEARS and DAAA WIZARD

Good old Search-and-replace, and it wasn't even Excel's fault.

Knew the answer immediately. I've seen a few instances of this kind of issue.

I should watch lateral!

"Must've been dark times, those 90s..." - Grasity Falls, Dungeons, Dungeons and more Dungeons