Death Of The Grammar Nazi

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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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220 thoughts on “Death Of The Grammar Nazi”

  4. There’s a saying in movie script writing that says, “Never try to write dialogue for characters who are smarter than you.”

    The reason for this advice is your character will come off as stilted and wooden, because a stupid person is trying to sound smart. It’s obvious and takes viewers out of the film. (Similar to how execs demand woke concepts be ham fistedly inserted into the script…your brain just groans from the cringe.)

    The AI machines will not make stupid people smarter relative to everyone else. Stupid people speaking into an AI word generator will still appear to be stupid relative to smart people using the same AI machine.

    Thanks to YouTube I can fix all manner of things myself these days. But I would never be mistaken for an electrician or mechanic. Those trades have access to the same information, and can focus their attention on more complex repairs I would never try…using YouTube.

    Relative to the electrician, I have gained nothing.

  5. I must say, that ghettopotamous in the first clip is one of the most obnoxiously stupid creatures I’ve seen in a while.

    Ship her back to Haiti!
    I don’t care if she was born here, ship her there anyways!

    You’d be saving the lives of a thousand cats.

  6. It could be my poor hearing, but I find that the confusion/conflation of competent and confident especially irritating.

  7. This already exists on the iphone. You try to type your text message and anything outside of its accepted word list it tries to automatically replace, forcing you to go back and do it again to let the computer know that you typed what you intended to type. It’s ducking annoying, and Tim Cook should get ducked right up his assuming and in his mouth until he’s got kismet running out of his nostrils.

  8. I’ve pretty much gotten to the point where I don’t consider creatures like that fat black musician/magician to actually be a woman. Female perhaps, but that’s it. How’s that for bad speak?

  9. While grammar nazis are irritating, poor grammar sometimes signals a dumb person pretending to be smart or promoted beyond their abilities.

    On Jared’s website, a man who fled the east coast for Idaho recalls that the final straw for him was when his son’s black teacher said, “Was you looking for Miss Briggs?” https://www.amren.com/commentary/2024/10/leaving-home/

    A recent example that grated on me was some guy on youtube trying to present himself as wise whose channel name was “Thinking Critical.” While I acknowledge that it is possible to wise and not understand how adverbs work, it’s not a good first impression.

    • “Was you looking for Miss Briggs?”

      One *might* have heard that uttered in the Assembly Rooms at Bath around the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

      Half tempted to riff on the duality of ‘levee’ but it don’t signify.

  11. Good gravy. I’ve already had to use Google 30 times and I’m not even halfway through the comments.

  12. Z, I once thought about offering to proofread your daily posts for you, but I got over getting irritated by the occasional typo.

    When I encountered Spellmangle™ on my phone, I figured that it was written by college interns with limited vocabularies. All the vast knowledge of the internet at their fingertips, and the Spellmangle™ couldn’t complete words I considered commonplace, let alone $2 words from the Before Times

    • And that’s another one:
      orkns now placing the dollar sign AFTER the number, rather than before.

      Europe leads the way on this travesty and the erroneous usage is almost 100% complete, across the pond.

      And now it’s arriving on our shores, especially as the general level of intelligence (and standards for, well, anything) is heading down the drane. (I think: or is it drain?) I must admit to mixing up thise two! Eee Gads!!

  13. I’ve mentioned that a friend of mine got in trouble at work for writing a corporate message without using “AI.” She doesn’t keep up with trends, so she didn’t know that speaking without automated constraint is considered a shocking violation of business etiquette. Primitive chatbots are already embraced as meta-corporate infallible judgment machines.

    Out here in normal life they’re something like the opposite. The last glow-lefty attack on /pol/, the one that finally got it right and destroyed the place, was accomplished primarily via infiltration—but the public face of it was people pretending to be bots. The unreadability of 4chan is the work of the mechanical pajeet. What are the x million high IQ Indian tech workers we’ve imported doing here, exactly? Thousands of them are BBC-posting in the “without sounding angry” threads they made.

    (Manfulness- and daring-themed memes built on Indian male insecurity are a big hit with a certain tendency of our guys. For example, one reason Patriot Front are suspected of being a fed op is because unlike actual rightists, who are a nearly random selection of men, the Front parade for the press in costume-department-issue TV-movie neonazi dress. The “You’re right, they must be feds because we all know real patriots are fat and look like shit” defense was brought to you by Vivek Polshitter. You may think you thought of it yourself, but you didn’t.)

    Chatbots cultivate universal distrust, because their potential for disruption is limitless. JIDF, ActBlue, etc., are just guys in rooms. There are more of us. Even on a field tilted in their favor, as old /pol/ was, we win decisively. But we can be (have been) infinitely outnumbered by ChatGPT instances—or Indians pretending to be them.

  14. 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 famous poet known for writing without capitalization was E. E. Cummings. He is celebrated for his unconventional style, which included irregular punctuation, capitalization, and spacing. If this guy can become famous for “tossing out the book”, then who am I to object? 🙂

    • “This sentence may be written in the passive voice.”

      The early MS Word grammar check was disliked by me so much….

    • Compsci – I’ve always hated E.E . Cummings, and all the would-be poets (idiot womyn and blacks) who justified their appalling attempts at poetry as writing in his ‘style.’ I particularly admire sonnets, and their creativity within a limited structure.

  15. 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.

  16. 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

    • I had a Dutch born/educated faculty member in the German dept at my university. Although young, he received his formal education in the Netherlands and was fluent in the dead languages of Greek and Latin. Although my memory fades of the man, what I remember is that he could, and did, explain most all those odd quirks in English language grammar, and particularly spelling, that stemmed from inclusion of/origin from those dead languages and words. For 12 years of grade school and high school my teachers had always shrugged, when questioned on such “oddities”, with the blow off— “that’s just the way it is”. 😉

  18. 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…)

  19. If the Germans want to rid themselves of all those der,die,das,dem,den,des definite articles (except one), I understand.

    • I can still remember a crap ton of German student grammatical mnemonics from 40 years ago, but cannot for the life of me remember what they are FOR.

  20. 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.

    • Aw, I don’t know.

      Let’s give them a pass, even though they could have aksed the employee at the lye-berry.

  21. 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.

    • “Is You Is, or Is You Ain’t My Baby,” could no more be written today than “Rocky” could be filmed.

  22. 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 a group catching the big points of an oral speaker and leaving with a communal, homogenous interpretation. Think of the classic image: A scop telling the history of his people, and all the people leaving with the chunks of meaning.
    Contrast with literacy: The classic image, a single person with a personal, isolated interpretation, contrasted against every other person reading the same material. The method of transmission fundamentally alters how we experience the information being transmitted.
    At least with books, a person either knows the material or realizes they do not know, for the repository of information is so clearly external. A person either knows they know the meaning of a word, or they recognize they do not. And, recognizing they do not, they know it is stored elsewhere.
    Now, consider tech: People are so intimate with tech, and the material is so closely linked to them, that they now conflate what they know with what they can access. Truly scary times.

    As an aside, I sometimes play the grammar Nazi, but only to troll. Much like when someone flips you the bird and you smile and wave back, refusing to get in the trenches with them and just making flippant observations drives them nuts.
    Otherwise, I could care less (sic – I know it is couldn’t).

    • Heck, Plato, in Phaedrus, wrote about the deleterious impact that writing has on thoughts and learning.

  23. 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…

  25. 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 things. Stalin and Khrushchev pulled their hair out by the roots trying to stamp it out.

    It’s easy to cast AI as a bogeyman. People – especially dissidents – are smart and resourceful. Could we use AI against itself? We are going to find out…

  27. 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 – rein/reign, hoard/horde, marshall/martial – these different spellings and meanings matter. If one cares about western civilization’s cultural roots in Greece and Rome, then one delights in English’s higher-level Latinate vocabulary. The sheer (not shear) word volume in English enables one to fine tune one’s tone and intent via the written word.

    • 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.

      • Ordnance and ordinance. (Try bombarding a town with ordinance. The paper 📄 will be everywhere)

        Hanger and hangar. One holds a shirt 👕, one holds an airplane ✈️.

          • Capital roughly means “first rank”, capitol is the seat of power. For instance, the capital city houses the capitol. At least that’s how I was taught growing up.

        • While Russia produces ordnance America has more ordinance than the rest of the world. That’s why America’s GDP is ten times Russia’s but csnt keep up with it in industrial warfare

          • American Ordinance dropped on Russia would bore a hole to the center of the Earth with all its mass.

            ObamaCare would be the MOAB.

    • The people that whine about ‘grammar nazis’ get on my nerves. Maybe they’ll get the sloppy (non)culture they deserve.

    • People who confuse “reign” and “rein,” “affect” and “effect,” etc shall be directed to the left once they exit the boxcar.

      I am more forgiving of typos as I have fat fingers and grew up doing hunt & peck on a regular keyboard as opposed to thumb-typing on a “device.”

    • General agreement, but I believe there is a difference between those that mean well and those that just like to tut tut people for making errors and display their superior intellects.

      In tribute to the latter, since we do occasionally get a few here that like to correct Z who is no stranger to grammatical errors, I must break out our favorite meme for this occasion. 😁

      https://i.imgur.com/TcWoSGS.jpeg

  28. 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 of what was quaintly known as “English.” I don’t think Globohomo wins in the end, though (maybe that opinion will be forcibly changed if technology progresses enough to detect and change internal BadThought). After all, imposing standards and eliminating indigenous language is racist and all.

  29. 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)?

      • Horses for Courses.

        Over at Sev’s fine forum using that bolt+nut emoji in this context would be classed as useful disambiguation.

    • And don’t forget the starting of many sentences wirh direct object “me.”

      Such as: “me and my friend went to…”

      I do work part time in an elem school, and when I hear that, I correct it.
      and keep correcting it.

      There are a few brjj oh get ones who get it. The rest are, well, uh, not so bright. Or they just don’t care.

  31. 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 is our opinion about this?” when some new story drops. So it is possible that their opinions, so sought, are directly supplied to them by bots answering that question. They don’t have to be subtly manipulated over time, they eagerly, willingly seek direction in exactly that fashion. It’s at least efficient. Although I cannot say with 100% certainty whether or not it was a bot asking that question in the first place, and thus normalizing such behavior for the NPCs to emulate.

    • 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 is a good instinct to have, it’s just aimed in the wrong direction.

        We don’t have to have an opinion on every subject. Often, we just don’t know enough or want to dedicate the time to really have an opinion on something.

        But instead of seeking your opinion by what others think, if you’re that interested in having an opinion on the topic, seek more information, or think longer about it.

        Outsourcing your opinion like that is a great way to be controlled by others.

        Sadly, in a democracy, everyone has to have an opinion on every freakin’ topic.

  32. 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.

    • I think cursive is dead/dying because of cell phone texting and e-mail. What you’ve no need for, you forget. What you forget is therefore a waste of time and resources to learn. Here in this State the legislature got together (IIR) to mandate it continue in k-12, but that seems a losing battle. Older teachers may decry such a loss, but the reality is that the “chicken-scratch” turned in by students is difficult to read, much less grade. Before I retired, most everything written was in digital form—if not for the ease of reading, then to upload such student submission to firms that examined/scored the essays for plagiarism. I played with such to some success even submitting computer program code.

    • Same. One of the most interesting classes I took towards my first incomplete MA was in Paleography, which I found I had an affinity for. Cannot remember it now, but I got quite good at reading Elizabethan cursive. Stood me in good stead when I began doing genealogy, and I had to first decipher and then translate 18th and 19th century Italian cursive. So much of western history will be lost to the digital generations who never learned cursive. Note: My own cursive is atrocious, but I still admire an elegant hand.

  33. 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?

    • 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.

        • The one that shoves me around the bend is using “dominate” for “dominant.” And I’ll happily be that guy and digitally slap the boob who does this.

    • There’s also a bunch of perverts using local LLMs to write what is presumably very dodgy fiction. Something I’ve gotten a whiff of in skimming r/locallama where this phenotype will drop in every now and then to ask the group for recommendations about which model weights are best to download for ‘story generation’.

  34. “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

      • When it comes to this grammar Nazi thread, I think it’s safe to compare everyone posting today to Hitler.

    • 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.

      • We need to return to home schooling and the one-room schoolhouse. This strict segregation by age instead of ability is moronic.

        • Not much of a grammar Nazi myself but something of a logic Nazi; one-room classes means less room for segregation, regardless of criteria

          • Moran: I am talking about education in a hypothetical future White ethnostate, of course. Even the idea of segregation still implies living alongside, if not directly amongst, the proto humans, and I cannot abide even that. Different solar systems or it’s a no go.

        • The concession by so many at the outset that our progeny must be in a gubermint facility fo’ edumacashon is alarming. Talk about conceeding defeat before the battle begins.

    • All these dystopian developments make me very happy I won’t be around to see the 22nd century.

    • My high school son was just saying how interesting a section of “Anna Karenina” was, where, over twenty pages, the characters were discussing mowing grass.

      I don’t care. I still want him to be an actuary.

          • A pedant (for such am I) would maintain that Hugo digresses in full-on Sperg Out Mode and that Melville merely had a yen for extended meditations.

    • “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.”

      Tell me about it. As an undergraduate, I was recommended for the university “Honors Society”. In those days, you first had a prof formally recommend you, then had to be interviewed by three other faculty members for admission. So there I sat in an office talking to 3 prof’s I’d never met before. Folks, this was *not* Ivy League—it was a GD State university. Since then we’ve descended into almost total darkness.

      So what did we have to talk about in common, nothing—except classics (talking books here) that you were expected to be familiar with. I was simply a Sophomore and knew nothing at the time, but was always pretty fast on my feet, so I switched the book inquiries to those I *had* read. They accepted Shakespearean plays as well. I thought we got along fine. I was admitted, but then had to have another damn interview—an “after action report” (feedback) if you will. Basically, I was told I was poorly “read” and to step up my game if I expected to succeed at this university.

      Tell me where you’ve heard of this recently?

  35. 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”

    • 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.

      • School is 20% about education and 100% about daycare (yes it’s more than 100% total, but if one has to go it ain’t going to be the “daycare”).

      • I already KNEW, by the time I was in 6th grade, that my teachers were all retards. Sorry, dumb as fuck, many sucking up to the popular kids. Pretty much was self-taught, used to read in class on my own all the time. Went to an ‘elite’ high school, so there’s that.

        Had one teacher, King of sucking up to pretty girls … in middle school. Such a dipshit, when we moved during the school year simply did not mention it to him. He spent a few days asking about me…early ghosting act!

      • There are 10s of millions of people walking around with a high school diploma or higher who posses a 6-8th grade education.
        Up until the 50s, the high school graduation rate was under 50%.

        Obviously, you have to account for the fact that some of these kids were forced out of school by economic circumstances. But even allowing for socioeconomic factors, it’s probably not over 60% total for kids with real high school diplomas plus kids who could have gotten one if not for circumstance. This was when the country was 85-90% White.

        Schools have pushing kids through for a long, long time, either by putting them in the dumb tract or just pushing them through based on age. However, back in the day, these people were largely kept out of safety critical professions.

        It really befuddles me that all these so-called professionals believe, or at least profess to believe that a 100% high school graduation rate (or close to it) is possible or even desirable.

        We now have doctors, engineers, airline pilots and other professions being loaded up with affirmative action graduates/employees who lack the underlying understanding needed to perform these jobs. God help us all.

        • You didn’t always need to go to school to go to work, also. Kind of makes sense, when you think about it. Learning on the job, apprenticeships. Vo-tech starts to look like the beginning of the effort to keep people in school earning credentials.

          Best argument against is the old, well-rounded, liberal eduction— which most people don’t want and, I imagine, never cared about. I’m all for it, but it’s pissing in the wind.

      • The Amish/Mennonites in my area go to school till they’re 14.

        Thats it.

        And it’s their own schools, not State propaganda sites.

        They won’t be building rocket ships, but things they can do, and manage, with no problem;

        Building stuff
        Growing food
        Fixing stuff

        Its almost like they are self sufficient!

        • But shouldn’t you prepare your descendants for life in the year 2040 not 1840?

          However, it may be that the Amish end up adopting robotics as much as anyone else.

          • We’ve all been conditioned to think that modern is “good” and tradition “bad.” Not the Amish. But a future with diversity will likely bring load shedding and other enrichments which may well render stuff like robotics impractical. Pray you live close enough to a few Amish with whom you might be able to barter for food, etc. Even better, study their lifestyle for what we may be able to glean from it.

          • If we ever get the demographics of South Africa – 80% black – we will definitely have to worry about everything falling apart. But that won’t happen in the next 200 years. Blacks are only 14% of the population. The Latinos we are importing will keep making things worse but not as bad as South Africa. East Asians, although not natural Americans, more or less work and don’t cause trouble.

            You’re great-grandchildren are not likely to be using a horse-driven plow to get their food. I know this is the dream of a lot of people around here but it’s not likely.

      • It aligns with IQ percentiles of who can really study what those educational tiers were, and should be, about.

      • I think this study was also cited (not sited) in Charles Murray’s “Real Education” but darned if I can find it.

    • Many decades ago, when I attended a small all-male engineering-only college (of which there were only 4 majors), I was told on Day 1 that I was here to “learn how to learn.” And we were required to buy slide rules and taught that you must first estimate the magnitude of any answer in your head before operating the device. A third of my freshman class dropped out after the first trimester. We can’t fix our country until we return to this level of honesty and rigor in education.

      • We can’t fix our country until we return to this level of honesty and rigor in education.

        Contemplate this: https://www.the74million.org/article/this-hartford-public-high-school-grad-cant-read-heres-how-it-happened/

        This Hartford Public High School Grad Can’t Read. Here’s How it Happened
        District officials acknowledged that in 12 years, Aleysha Ortiz never received reading instruction or intervention.
        When 19-year-old Aleysha Ortiz told Hartford City Council members in May that the public school system stole her education, she had to memorize her speech.
        Ortiz, who was a senior at Hartford Public High School at the time, wrote the speech using the talk-to-text function on her phone. She listened to it repeatedly to memorize it.

        That’s because she was never taught to read or write — despite attending schools in Hartford since she was 6.

        Sounds bad. Then wrap your mind around this:

        Despite this, she received her diploma this spring after improving her grades in high school — with help from the speech-to-text function — and getting on the honor roll. She began her studies at the University of Connecticut this summer.

        Ortiz can’t read even most one-syllable words. The words she can read were memorized during karaoke or from subtitles at the bottom of TV screens and associating the words she saw with what she heard, she said.

        So someone who, quite literally, would be flummoxed by “Dick and Jane” kindergarten readers, or One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish is a college student.

      • As a math major, I bought an old slide rule to help me visualize exponential and logarithmic progressions.

        • As a baseball statistics fanatic when I was ten (1970-71) I played a lot of table baseball games and kept meticulous, updated stats on every team and player. No calculators then, not for kids anyway (those that existed were expensive business tools). But dad showed me how to use a slide-rule to multiply and divide. I knew nothing of logarithms, but I knew how to use the slide rule to calculate batting averages and ERA, which was what I cared about.

          Anyone who went through public school in the seventies will recall those old textbooks that included several pages filled with log tables. After I understood why it worked, I brought my slide rule to class and skipped the printed tables by using it instead. None of the other students had ever seen a slide rule, let alone knew how to use one. Then here I was (no great shakes in math, aside from my obsession with numbers) producing answers to questions almost instantly as the rest of the class fumbled through their log tables. Soon enough a student claimed I was cheating, and in hindsight she was correct; I was using a mechanical device to find a correct answer just as if I were punching numbers into a pocket calculator.
          The difference being that I understood how it worked, and our teacher let me continue using it in class (though the rules prohibited its use on exams).

          I suppose that nowadays a slide rule is as mysterious as an astrolabe. I looked for one a few times back in the nineties when I was a math teacher myself, but had no luck.

    • I saw a friend yesterday that is a professor at a major university. He made it VERY clear he wants OUT. Said he would rather do anything than deal with the students, the administration… recently had a no-nothing obvious DEI new boss installed.

      My friend has many years of experience and told me he planned to stay there ‘so my kids could go’ when we first met. Bright, talented down to earth huwhyte guy.

      Who could have seen this coming…

    • Anyone remember blue books? Do they still use those? I loved taking blue book exams cause it made you write quick essays on the spot. I thought it was great training

      • I actually wrote my doctoral comps in blue books. I was the last of the breed. My committee members called me the “paleo test-taker.”

    • Shades of Little House on the Prairie, Laura in 8th grade could do long division in her head, parse/diagram a long sentence, and recite history from memory, and manage unruly other schoolchildren when she herself was little more than a child. I could teach someone to read and write in less than a week. These are absolutely critical skills. How do you know if you are being cheated if you can’t even calculate APR or ROI?

  36. 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.

        • 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).

          • I find that, the older I get, the more I make these elementary mistakes. I see what I’ve written, and then, aghast, quickly check to see if the edit function is still engaged for the post in question.

          • Yeah I don’t know why I always have to hit enter before actually looking at what I just typed. Thank God for the edit button.

          • This is precisely why we’d be better off avoiding the grammar Nazi stuff. The only use I can see for it here is to clarify potential misinterpretation of an idea posted. But when we all know what the point is of the commentator, then let it pass. It’s the idea that counts more than the expression.

          • I don’t mind if somebody takes a poke at me for some error. It’s my “job” to write clean copy. At any rate, I’ve got a thick skin.

      • 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.

        • Acronyms in general are galling–Gauling?–unless one understands the acronym. And I’m guilty of deploying obscure acronyms from time to time, myself.

    • 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.

      • That’s a good and doubtless verboten point. The plague of poor grammar, word choice, syntax, etc. is not primarily a function of language’s evolution; it is the result of general cognitive decline. The abandonment of prescriptive lexicography is, more than anything, just another aspect of dumbing down on behalf of the dusky.

    • Back in the Stone Age of the 1950s, American schools used to teach grammar and spelling…no more..

        • Yep, which is why the distinction between “who” and “whom” is dead. Indeed, I believe I read a while back that such questions involving their use were removed from standardized testing as unable to distinguish between high scoring and low scoring students, i.e., “item discrimination”.

        • Oh Dear Lord, sentence diagramming. 🤦‍♂️

          AKA “Suck the enjoyment out of reading and writing teacher.”

          • I think we did a little in middle school – it didn’t stick. I actually learned and applied a lot of English grammar by studying foreign languages.

          • Me too.
            i was rubbish at English grammar until I learned French.
            I was thus forced to understand the difference between a direct and indirect object!

          • Me three. I never really got English grammar until I studied Latin. Yes, I’m so old that Latin was offered at my public school. Also, but only because a bunch of us petitioned for it, Greek. That left me with all sorts of archaic habits, such as a lifelong love of the Future Perfect.

          • Even the few weeks of basic Latin I took as a grammar school kid helped me with vocabulary, and the verbal SAT.

      • My Fifties grammar school taught diagramming of sentences. Also held spelling bees. Catholic school, though.

        • The Catholic grammar school I went to used Scientific Reading Associates SRA to teach reading comprehension. Short essays color-coded by reading level followed by a quiz, if I’m remembering correctly. The smart kids all competed to read at the highest level.

      • I can attest it was still being done in the 80s, at least in my part of the world. After that, I’m not sure. It seemed like a lot of dumbing down happened in the 90s.

      • Forget the Stone Age — my kids joke about when they are in middle school, and came home with ‘A’ graded work I told them was SHIT. Home schooled them, and now they are among the top communicators among their peers and enjoy many benefits accordingly.

        They still share a laugh about it …. “remember when Dad…”

    • My favorite one was someone noting that to tell dessert from desert just remember that dessert has two ‘s’s, just like “ass” which gets bigger when you eat it.
      (For rein and reign for some reason it just sticks in my mind that horse “reigns” make no sense).

    • I am trying to let go of “begs the question.” The original meaning of this phrase was to assume what you are trying to prove. Now, even smart people use it for “motivates the question.”

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

      Out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac
      A little voice inside my head said, “Don’t look back, you can never look back”

  37. You might want to patent the phrase ” usual suspects” it might come in very handy as a work around in this new paradigm.

    • The use of “Amish” and “Esquimeaux” is going to, like, totally screw up anthropology.

    • As a patent lawyer, or their patient liar to my clients, I feel dutybound to inform you that phrases are not patentable subject matter. Nor are words and short phrases copyrightable. Z may protect the usual suspects if he promotes the phrase as a service mark. I am fairly sure you did nazi this correction coming.

      • But trade slogan infringement is actionable. Or else the Kneegrow Felon League’s lawyers would be driving volkswagens instead of porsches.

  38. 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 of language …

    — Greg (my blog: http://www.dark.sport.blog)

    • Shakespeare’s stuff is difficult to read because it was written to be witnessed as live plays, not strictly read. It’s like reading a movie script, where you have the additional arbitrary layer of translating it in your imagination.

  39. 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

  41. 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!

    • Frequently, on feedback for eBay transactions, I’ll write, “Flawless tranny.” Juvenile? Only in the extreme. But I don’t give a dam’. If it causes stewed kale to lodge in some Leftist moonbat’s gullet, then I have performed a service to mankind.

  43. 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

  44. 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 make it worse. This means that 30% of your workforce will be consumed into vapid AI-speak of their tools, which will just make it easier to see who’s not a zombie.

  45. I thought AI over coming art creation was disheartening but now this makes it worse.
    Kind Regards,
    David

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