A truth revealed by the widescale adoption of the internet was that there were millions of people with a blue pencil desperate to use it. The Grammar Nazi is a thing unearthed and unleashed on the world by the internet. When comment sections were still common, every story or post came with comments correcting the grammar or highlighting a typo. It was clear that the person posting the comment had no interest in the content of the post, other than what he considered to be violations of the rules of grammar.
The Grammar Nazi is something that can only exist online. Sure, he could get a teaching job and terrorize school children or get a job as a copy editor at a newspaper, but where is the fun in that? The thing that brings joy to the black heart of the Grammar Nazi is correcting people who do not expect to be corrected. Finding a post online that has an open comment section and then posting a short note about a missing comma or the incorrect use of “there/their” is the fruit of life.
Unfortunately for the Grammar Nazi, his days are running short because the same forces that brought him to life are about to take away his life. Another thing we will get with AI is the rigid formalization of online discourse. The old fashioned spellcheck and grammar check in Word will soon be replaced by real-time rewrites of your text in the generally accepted form. That means no more grammar errors or spelling errors for the Grammar Nazi to hunt online.
There will be people who holdout and write their own text. There are people who still own pens and pads of paper. It will not be long, however, when the browser simply corrects your “mistakes” and rewrites your copy. Those idiomatic expressions you love so much will be replaced with text that can easily be translated into other languages and understood by new language learners. The same will happen with colorful euphemisms and salty language. None of it will be allowed.
You can see the future in Word. Run text through the old-fashioned spelling and grammar check and it regularly suggests you change the wording of sentences in order to make them less interesting. For example, if you type “There are a lot of mudgets in here”, misspelling “midgets” as you see, it will not suggest the word “midget” as the replacement because that is an offensive term. If you persist, it will warn that it is insensitive language. We know what comes next.
On the other hand, the genuinely stupid will soon be able to present themselves online as they imagine themselves through services like Grammarly that will rewrite their incoherent jibber-jabber into something intelligible. In fact, they will not even need to know how to read and write. They will just speak and the machine will figure out what they should write and write it. This woman will never have to worry that she may be a “magician” rather than a “musician.”
That may be a bridge too far, but you can see how these grammar services can quickly transition from mere grammar services into thinking services. The low-IQ person may not fully understand the resulting product, but the happy face emoji at the end of the process will let her know she did good. In effect, technology will remove the midwit from the internet and replace her with a bot, a bot that never makes a spelling or grammar error to give the game away.
It is easy to dismiss these sorts of claims about technology and the language, but they are based on our history with the printed word. The very idea of grammar as something to debate was made possible by the printing press. The necessary standardization that came with the mass production of text changed how we think. It changed the grammar, punctuation, spelling and even the alphabet. We write a different language as a result, which means we think in a different language too.
Unlike the time when the printing press revolutionized the world, ours is a much darker time with tighter rules on what can and cannot be said. We already see how the internet has narrowed and dulled the public debate. When it can intercede between your brain and what you are trying to write, it is easy to see how we can quickly get to a future that Orwell would have thought impossible. Soon, it may be impossible to post an impure thought or a poorly formed sentence.
Even if it does not reach that point, these writing services will surely strip originality and creativity from the language. The constant hectoring from Word about the use of “write a book” instead of “author a book” will eventually wear down users to the point where this sort of variety is gone from our writing. All nuance and idiosyncrasy will be replaced with the technical manual version that the robots demand. As a result, we will become as boring and stupid as a National Review columnist.
There are signs of this happening. This post about changes in German grammar is a good example of what lies ahead. This change is not to make German more precise to Germans, but to make it more accessible to non-German speakers. That may sound good to English speakers, but language is more than just how people speak. It is how they think and how they think evolved over generations. How they think is their inheritance from their ancestors and the core of their culture.
Of course, the main argument against the Grammar Nazi was that grammar is a fluid thing that changes over time. Obsessive concern for rules of grammar and word usage is a losing fight. After all, what we think of as punctuation is a novelty in the history of the written word. The core features of the current rules were innovations. To put an end to innovation is an effort to kill the spirit of the language. Like the people who speak it, the language must be free to seek its own path.
That is now where things are heading, at least not for the written word. It will not be long before the outlaw is the man who uses outlawed words in outlawed forums using now outlawed word processing software and browsers. Everyone else will screaming into the void that is the Large Language Model version of the software, as it rewrites their text to remove unpermitted thoughts and expressions. The Grammar Nazi will have been replaced by this new, hellish form of spellcheck.
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My cousin teaches finance at a major university. Spring semester, as an experiment, he required all of his students to complete their assignments and examinations in class and to submit them using only pencil and paper. It was an absolute disaster and he was called to the dean’s office. My cousin is having a sort of crisis of faith. “I’ve been teaching for twenty-five years and I don’t think they’ve learned anything”
I guess he is facing dismissal based on moral turpitude.
John Derbyshire cited research which purportedly demonstrates that only 50% of students benefit from being in formal education beyond age 12 (equating to around six years of schooling), 20% beyond age 16, and 10% beyond age 18. In other words, education beyond the eighth grade (compulsory or otherwise) is not only a misallocation of resources, but a waste of time for the vast majority of students. Just another example of modern societies falling for the Scarecrow fallacy.
Bryan Caplan writes much upon this with studies to back such up at the college level. Two aspects continue to produce this “surplus of elites”: Government funding of college, employers requiring degrees not needed for job description.
It’s pretty much an open secret now more than half of college students either directly cheat or at least are in a gray area.
I’ll admit that the improper use of “rein” (to rein in the Regime, to not let troons have free rein in elementary schools) and “reign” (a reign of terror) will always drive me nuts, and when you people do it here I have to grit my teeth and refrain from putting you in the Grammar Konzentrationslager.
I hate to reign in your parade…
“On” the parade, dammit!!!”
😂
Miss America reigned over the parade, though it rained heavily, and the horses had to be reined in…
The problem here might be that a typical commenter knows the difference among these three concepts/definitions, but spells them incorrectly given use. I do such all the time with their and there. I type quickly—and quite regularly, out pops “their” when overwhelmingly, I want “there”.
I think such a problem is fundamentally different than many who use “your” for “you’re” (you are).
The other one that absolutely infuriates me is using the super gay Army abbreviations and acronyms for military ranks, in all capitals (LTC rather than lt. col,. lieutenant colonel, MG or “two star general” for maj. gen., major general) rather than abbreviating and spelling them out correctly, and capitalizing them improperly when it is not used in a proper noun naming a specific person.
The one that drives me nuts everytime it hear it is the use of the word “less” instead of “fewer”. It raises my blood pressure to hear someone talking of “less people” or “less cars”. What makes it sad is that I think the loss of the word “fewer” isn’t due to some natural change in the way people speak. The word’s been lost because the majority of people today are simply ignorant of and/or incapable of understanding the difference between the discrete and continuous.
Back in the Stone Age of the 1950s, American schools used to teach grammar and spelling…no more..
So you’re telling me elementary students don’t diagram sentences anymore?
Lmao!
Jawohl.
We eagerly await the Ebonics AI grammar bot!
The Ebonics chatbot will be code named “Shee-AI-it!”
Ebonics will be encouraged as a sign of sophistication, the language of future doctors and engineers (and current poets) turning their lives around.
Yo, poke a syringe in the brothas a$$, shoot him full of dope for da pain and hustle on
Ebonics is too hard and with too many rules. We need Pidgin!!!
“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
“Long form” is getting shorter and shorter anyway.
I’m sure everyone here saw the stories making the rounds that high school kids go to college and have never read a whole book.
Twitter, Tiktok, chatGPT, AI summaries of books…I’m rapidly coming the conclusion that the “Great Filter” in the universe is that at a certain stage, civilizations collapse because their citizens have the attention span of a goldfish.
I think you mean “long-form”. This post is going to bring out the inner grammar Nazi in everyone haha
This is why we need segregation. With White kids making up less than 1/2 of all kids in the US, they are sharing classrooms with all the diverse kids. This is one of the ways the mean really matters. I had to read books cover to cover starting around 2nd or 3rd grade.
But the standards have collapsed. We now have millions of adults possessing a high school diploma with a 6th or 7th grade education. Many of them have a degree.
As an occasional grammar notsee and one who delights in English literature, I take issue with your dismissal of spelling, punctuation, and word choice as mere late ‘adornments’ towards standardizing the language. No, I could never diagram a sentence, but all those old fashioned ‘rules’ did and do serve a purpose – clear and concise non-verbal communication. Instead of having to explain and expound, proper grammar and correct use of homonyms clarifies thought and intention. And I didn’t learn most of what I know in school – I learned it from reading – a lot. I’m with Pickle Rick –… Read more »
Non-verbal? I think you are misusing the word. You seem to flirt with the concept of fine tuning tone, but, right before, you discuss clear thought.
fine-tuning* 🙂
You are correct and that was a stupid/careless mistake on my part – I should have written “non oral.”
Breach and breech
Since we think in language, I wonder if AI could be used to help people think/reason more clearly? If it can be used to eliminate Bad Think, perhaps it could help people think better. Nah. It’d be sued into bankruptcy by the DOJ for disparate impact.
Not really. People who use AI do it almost entirely passively. It’s just uploading one program for another, even if it is a program that helps our side.
The paradox of AI is the smarter you are, the less enlightening it is. It gives an efficiency boost, but outside of things like learning a foreign language, most can easily learn faster using earlier methods, like reading a book.
When we invented the airplane we developed the bomber long before we built the airliner. That’s government technology in a nutshell. IT conforms to norm
On the internet, the NPC is already indistinguishable from the bot. Nor is it always clear which is mimicking which. Which begs the legitimate question of which came first. Since an NPC (is a or an proper there?) by definition can’t have original thoughts, but the NPC existed before the bot, I think. He was made an NPC by something else besides the bot. The older ones, anyway. Younger NPCs may be more bot inspired. As I have posted before, I regularly read posts on reddit, it probably rots my brain, but anyway, I commonly see posters explicitly asking “what… Read more »
This is such a great comment even if it is offensive to bots. I’ve actually heard IRL the phrase “what is our opinion on this?” The question is the most feminine abomination imaginable.
This made me recoil in horror as if i’d been called into an HR meeting.
The final version of the Newspeak dictionary will consist entirely of emojis.
📰 2 x 👎
There are now videos on the internet of people using ChatGPT to conduct self psychoanalysis. The LLM plays the role of the psychologist and people unburden themselves of their darkest secrets, fears, and dysfunctions; and then have lively interactions with a bot parroting advice found in women’s magazines. Undoubtedly, there are AIs studying these psychoanalytical sessions and harvesting your data for future sales and use by others. What does it mean to be human anymore when all of life is technocratic?
This is how it all started. ELIZA was a psychotherapist.
I wouldn’t worry too much Tom. If worse comes to worst – there is always the “off” button.
Speaking of which, a personal bugaboo of mine is the misuse of “worse” for “worst”. There are many others but I know that languages evolve, so I remain silent because I don’t want to be that guy — the “grammar Nazi” when there are far greater things to be concerned about.
Fourth paragraph, third sentence: “It will not be long, however…”
An email that I was sending was refused by ebay yesterday for the use of the phrase ‘cock up’, which aparently could be offensive! You could say that I fell ‘fowl’ of their bot – ho ho ho.
I must have ‘rustled the feathers’ of the prick!
The sensitivity and inclusivity features of grammar apps are the first things I turn off. Used properly, grammar apps are incredible in giving you a view into words that you are overusing, filler phrases that add nothing, and singular/plural mismatches. The thing with LLM’s is they all have the same stale, irritating cadence. Even with some prompt engineering it’s hard to get rid of. They are also, paradoxically, largely information devoid because of the heavy pressure to avoid bad-think conclusions. Corporations already had such weird, stodgy rules that internal documents were already a running joke, and AI is going to… Read more »
Time to go back to quill pens.
Funny thought, but perhaps in the future the mark of true intelligence will be the act of being grammatically incorrect. I.e not only being able to evade the AI filters but having a good enough grasp on language to be incorrect about it.
You might want to patent the phrase ” usual suspects” it might come in very handy as a work around in this new paradigm.
Ah, the magic of rap.
I don’t like the term Grammar Nazi as it’s so 20th-Century and evokes magic words that our Regime hisses at. Also, with all the historical revisionism going ’round, some people would argue that Grammar Nazis weren’t all that bad, and Grammar Tories may have been just as bad, or worse.
Let’s call them Grammar Fags for the time being.
Grammar Commissars.
I once read that a lot of the strange English grammar rules came about because the people who formulated them back when modern English was developing used Latin as a template for the rules. Latin and English are quite different and the square peg of English never quite fit in the round hole of Latin.
That makes a lot of sense. I think English has the largest vocabulary of any language because of the Norman invasion. The new foreign overlords who became the founding stock of English aristocracy, distinguished themselves by using a different word for many things that had a social relevance, especially food
Using grammar Nazis as an example you’re saying digital AI Karen will be worse than meat Karen and will kill her. Brave new furniture (autocorrect suggested furniture instead of future and I’m already complying…)
If the Germans want to rid themselves of all those der,die,das,dem,den,des definite articles (except one), I understand.
My personal mission over the years has been to retain the distinction between the verb “led” and the noun “lead.” Confusion of the two here, for instance, draws a blue line underneath the misused word, yet my personal mission has failed and “led” as a verb has all but disappeared despite all the forceful technological advances to preserve the distinction. Globohomo strives for conformity, so attempts to make language dully uniform are to be expected. The next step will be attempts to eliminate all different languages from the face of the Earth and to impose one uniform but African-friendly version… Read more »
The enemy needs cold steel and hot led
How many have noticed the increasing inability of Internet posters to tell the difference between lose (the opposite of win) and loose (the opposite of tight)?
It’s been a long time since I’ve used “MS Word” in any substantive way, the department being a Unix house initially with faculty and staff using those tools before there was even MS Word availability. I distinctly remember Word’s early attempts at grammar checking. It was very annoying. One thing I noticed immediately is that their grammar checker was a “style killer”. This is a very astute insight made today by Z-man. I fully admit to poor grammar as I was taught by well meaning nuns in Parochial school and apologize to them unashamedly—but I’m not going to change. A… Read more »
The one that drives me nuts is how frequently I see people write “loose” when they mean “lose”, “loosing” for “losing”, etc. It’s usually the only spelling error in the post or comment and done by intelligent people who really should know better. It’s bizarre just how common this is.
Some reading for those interested: Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy. Fischer, et al., “Searching the Explanations: How the Internet Inflates…” The impact of tech on the current era cannot be overstated. The shift from a primarily oral to literate culture in England(Manuscript era) still preserved the thought process of oral; this accounted for the popularity of frame narrative during the time (e.g. The Canterbury Tales) as a means to mimic oral patterns in text. The shift to a new way of thinking was gradual. And it was a new way of thinking The primary experience of oral knowledge transmission is… Read more »
Heck, Plato, in Phaedrus, wrote about the deleterious impact that writing has on thoughts and learning.
Ahh…takes me back to my salad days when teachers would write to a tobacco company to point out that “like” in “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” should be replaced by “as”.
But when the USA breaks up in the 2030s, we will end up with several different versions of English, and Grammarly will have to enquire where you live to fix your scribblings…if Grammarly even exists…
I dunno, Z. old internet behaviour patterns might bode well for today. I remember the old message boards in the late 90’s – when they began to moderate them to appease the liberal faggotry – the normies all left and set up boards elsewhere. Left to themselves, the old message boards died. Gab is a product oh the phenomenon. Perhaps your site here is too? People misunderstand the free speech issue: there will ALWAYS be free speech. Even at the height of the Nazi regime in Germany, people were getting shot and sent to the camps for saying the wrong… Read more »
Why wait? The future is here:
https://www.feedough.com/business-jargon-generator/
Grammar and style correction AI will simply create millions of writing versions of Oswald Bates.
https://youtu.be/71xxvp5R9hE?si=NDUSQl0Ce8RTSFTG
On the other hand, in my browsing through the internet this morning, I saw both “money” and “Halloween” used as verbs. Do you know how to money? Some folks really know how to Halloween. Creative, no?
JWM
I thought AI over coming art creation was disheartening but now this makes it worse.
Kind Regards,
David
Of course proper grammar is going away the same as cursive writing has all but been eliminated because they both have their roots in W Civ and as we all know, WC is racist and must be dismantled. And as for my pen and notepad, you can pry those from my cold, dead fingers.
Language is constantly evolving. New words appear in the dictionary all the time and old words drop out of usage. Modern languages “froze” about the year 1750. It’s difficult to read Shakespeare because he was writing 150 years before. On the other hand, a Stephen King book from the 1970s will still be readable in 3000, if English is still being used. To capture a language at a point in time is to imprison a butterfly. 🦋 It is a fragile thing. Perhaps in the future, with technology, we’ll have telepathy and raw idea-concepts will replace the building block words… Read more »