English, Engines & Grey Matter: Ada Lovelace Would Like a Word With Your Brain
October 13, 2026 | Ada Lovelace Day • English Language Day • National Train Your Brain Day
1362: English Enters the Room
Imagine being summoned to court and hearing proceedings in a language you barely understand. No subtitles. No translation app. Just the creeping suspicion that something important is happening, possibly at your expense.
Medieval England knew this problem. French dominated legal proceedings, while Latin remained the language of official records. On 13 October 1362, Parliament's opening address was delivered in English, according to The English Project, which established English Language Day in 2009 to commemorate the event.
The associated Statute of Pleading also permitted court proceedings in English, while requiring them to be recorded in Latin.
That distinction matters:
Speaking English and recording English were not yet the same thing.
English had entered the room. Bureaucracy still held the pen.
Five centuries later, another ambitious thinker would ask what happens when symbols stop being merely written or spoken—and start being processed by a machine.
Enter Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage
Ada Lovelace met mathematician Charles Babbage in 1833, when she was seventeen. Babbage was designing calculating machines; Ada saw possibilities extending beyond calculation.
In 1843, she translated an account of his proposed Analytical Engine and added extensive notes, including a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers. Her work is widely associated with the first published computer algorithm. The machine itself was never completed in their lifetimes.
Her most intriguing insight?
A machine operating on symbols might eventually represent music and other things, not simply numbers.
In other words, Ada looked at a machine and saw more than a very expensive calculator.
Train Your Brain Day: Who Ordered This Holiday?
Here is the deliciously odd part:
National Train Your Brain Day falls on October 13, too, but its origin story remains unclear.
The National Day Calendar encourages puzzles, riddles and learning new things, while acknowledging that the holiday's origins are still being researched.
No documented founding genius. No grand historical proclamation. No Ada standing beside a giant brain-shaped machine.
Just a day inviting us to give our minds something more interesting to do than remember passwords and wonder why we entered a room.
Reading is one option. A mystery makes you test hypotheses; historical fiction asks you to reconstruct another world; a clever narrator makes you question the evidence. Even a book review requires you to compare, interpret and explain why a story works—or doesn't.
No, reading isn't a guaranteed upgrade to your IQ. But curiosity, active learning and mental challenge are worthwhile habits.
From 1362 to 2026: The Plot Thickens
English once struggled for recognition in formal institutions. Ada imagined machines capable of manipulating symbols. Today, we read, write and argue with computers that would have seemed fantastical to both.
The connection isn't that history was secretly preparing one enormous birthday party for October 13.
It's that language gives ideas expression, imagination expands their possibilities, and a curious mind connects the dots.
So here's your book-reviewer's brain-training challenge: read something unfamiliar, question a character's motives, or learn a word you can't wait to use incorrectly at dinner.
One final question:
If Ada could programme a machine to do anything, would she make it write a novel—or write the reviews?
Babbage, presumably, would still be waiting for the instruction manual.
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