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Writing with AI: I couldn’t have put it better myself
I’ve never used AI to help me write or edit. So I was interested to hear the thoughts of two scientists who often have written their articles with AI: Bastien Le Guellec, a radiologist at Lille...
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To kindly ask what no one has asked before
A railway tannoy announces: ‘We kindly ask you to place your litter in the bins provided.’ It is indeed kind of them to ask. Or is it? Is that really what they mean? Sounds a bit odd, when you think...
View ArticleHow grammarians failed to contain reflexive pronouns
The standard rule on pronouns that end in -self or -selves, set out in grammar books from Lowth (1762) to Whitney (1885) to Jespersen (1933) to Quirk (1985) to Garner (2022), is that they are for...
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Who’s in the news?
Yes, that’s right. Here are two written versions of the same spoken utterance: What are you? Stupid? What are you, stupid? The first version corresponds with the conventions of standard (if informal)...
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Getting it in for me
Kenneth Williams would have been 100 yesterday, so I found myself thinking about one of the finest puns in cinematic history: his line in Carry On Cleo, ‘Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!’...
View ArticleTom Stoppard on malarkey with words
Among the many dazzling quotes that have been circulating since Tom Stoppard’s death, this one caught my eye. It’s from his 1982 play The Real Thing, spoken by the character Henry, a playwright, who...
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A shore thing?
Rhyl Sands by David Cox, 1854. This was posted on social media today by the BBC Newsnight account: Kay Burley says Kemi Badenoch’s performance at party conference has sured up her position as leader...
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The largest language model anyone could ever need
(With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan) I am the largest language model anyone could ever needI’m trained on hefty datasets that no one sane would ever readI’ll answer any question with great...
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Defeating the grammar nazis
I was listening to some of the statements made by Winston Churchill on VE Day in 1945, and this short passage, delivered from the Ministry of Health building in London, drew the attention of my inner...
View ArticleFolding and conceding: the logic of the rules in our heads
Twice in the last week I’ve been struck by people citing supposed rules of English usage that differ from my own understanding. These two cases illustrate the way that many of us associate correctness...
View ArticleStop. And stop.
Cenotaph attendee Liz Truss has today instructed her lawyers to send Keir Starmer a cease-and-desist letter. The gist is that he must stop saying that she “crashed the economy”, a scurrilous falsehood...
View ArticleA child of so many tantrums?
Yesterday I heard about a couple who had, for reasons unknown, bestowed upon their innocent, doomed baby son the name Tantrum. After the laughter passed, I wondered about those unknown reasons. What,...
View ArticleWhen the past is still with us
I just heard a data point on the radio. It was a case of something that Arthur Hughes, Peter Trudgill and Dominic Watt identified in their 2012 book English Accents and Dialects as a potential small...
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People will judge you and me (and you and I) for our bad grammar
We should use grammatically correct Standard English, the stern yet kindly pedants tell us, for our own good. People who don’t use it risk being judged as unintelligent, ill-educated, lazy, obnoxious,...
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Machines Rise
St Mary[’]s Walk in Harrogate. Photo by BBC/Naj Modak All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again: another council is removing apostrophes from its street signs. Residents –...
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Congratulations and confabulations
I asked HAL 9000 to write this blog post for me. Damn thing couldn’t even get my name right. I get irrationally annoyed by dictionary ‘word of the year’ announcements. Something that is obviously of...
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Leaving everything or leaving nothing? A saying of two halves
Alex Greenwood, who hurt her head pondering a point of semantics. The greatest controversy arising from England’s footballing defeat to Spain yesterday wasn’t about aggressive tackles, debatable...
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Colonial English?
‘A new and accurat map of the world’ by John Speed, 1626. We regret to inform you it is neither new nor accurat. Oxfam drew some political flak earlier in the year when it published a new version of...
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Boffin-biffing buffoons baffled by beef, before befriending
The Institute of Physics has launched a campaign against using the word “boffin” to refer to scientists and other researchers. They argue that the word conjures up an unhelpful, outdated stereotype...
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When words don’t mean what they’re meant to mean
Plato, the inventor of the plate. David Bentley Hart has written a witty, insightful, elegant and provocative piece on ‘How to write English prose’. Given the topic, it’s hard to judge the style and...
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