The guy who used to write Motivated Grammar. Erstwhile blogger: https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com
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Because AI lies all the time. I tried to find any evidence of this in Cherryh's book and came up empty. It's possible it's in there I just didn't look in the right place. But AIs are so notorious for making things up that it's irresponsible not to confirm this is real before spreading the rumor.
I think it tells them what they want to hear. It's hard to convince (some) people that AIs are inaccurate because the AI likes to tell the user they're right. I've started giving my students a task to ask an AI about something they know well, and that's the quickest way to convince them it lies.
That's a pretty obvious piece of evidence that the AI is just making up an answer; it's incredibly unlikely that Cherryh would've had that misspelling in the published work. Barbara probably copied Acyn's misspelling and then the AI repeated it while making up a source.
That's almost certainly not true. You should never trust AI bots for something as important as this; they constantly hallucinate. It's incredibly irresponsible to share this as if it's true! There are so many good reasons to be mad at her; this isn't one and makes all of us look bad.
"I believe in freedom of religion! I also believe in discriminating against you for your religion! I am both non-contradictory and a liberal?"
Not to mention that it's clear he falls for the most tepid of praise! "I couldn't be bothered to read your book, but I basically agree with it" is a dismissal. Yet he's holding it up like it's a signed contract reading "I will never meaningfully disagree with you".
The headlong push to authoritarianism is starting to hit some hurdles, writes Robert Kuttner. prospect.org/politics/202...
ICYMI, this series is one of my favorite things I've ever done
Sucks she supports Mamdani only because "he's the nominee", when the other candidates are a gov who resigned in disgrace, a vigilante, & a mayor whose campaign finance charges were dropped by sucking up to Trump and claiming they were lies cooked up by the Biden admin (which includes Harris)
I hate to hand it to a Tory, but footnote 4 is awfully well delivered. "Oh yeah, also, there's an obviously corrupt Lordship, but we'll have to deal with that another time." It lands less well when you remember their corrpution, but in isolation, it's good snark!
"Urge" is such a weird verb to use with Trump, because he's almost uniquely incapable of urging. He declares, he demands, he asserts, he tells, he forces. Or he just rambles nonsensically. Urging requires some sense of rationality and a belief that others gets to make their own decisions.
Scootch is mad at me because she can't tell time. She thinks that it is 10am already and that I am being negligent in my one important job: feeding her. I don't enjoy being told *I'm* wrong by someone who is wrong. But at least she has the decency to look cutely outraged at my uselessness.
Just like with the Iraq war, I know it's inevitable that everyone will turn out to have been silently against this genocide in retrospect. But it's really hard for me to believe that anyone who couldn't even tolerate on-campus protests were actually secretly on the same side as the protestors.
Look back at him and his ilk; it's all people who got microphones not just because they were compelling, but because they were conservative and anti-Islam. Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, etc. There were equally good debaters (PZ Myers, etc.) who weren't praised because they weren't Thatcherite enough.
His "debating" with Christians was based not in a "No Gods, No Masters" idea, but a "No Gods, I Should Be Master". Media outlets could cover him because he wanted to overthrow religion because it helped to achieve his Thatcherist "no such thing as society" idea.
Hitchens's atheism was conservative, and even if I benefited from it by ditching my tattered religious trappings, I ended up worse by having him as an inspiration because of his rampant Islamophobia and fever for West Asian Wars. I would've gotten to atheism without him.
I dunno... I think a lot of Hitchens's and the New Atheists' popularity was that they weren't actually to the left in any meaningful way, including their "radical" ideas, and thus could be safely platformed and agreed with by people with power.
Sorry to be jumping in on this so late, but this isn't new. It was the subject of three studies starting in the late 1990s, and it's older than the US. The reason it's centered in Pittsburgh and the South Midland dialect region is it's a Scots English construct and arrived with Scottish immigrants.
Oh, yeah, sorry, I re-read what you copied and it's obviously "no one would listen to me that they didn't go conservative enough!!"
Wasn't his objection to Walz as a "risk-averse wasted opportunity" that he was too lefty? As I recall, Yggy et al wanted someone like Shapiro, fresh off his support of crackdowns on campus protesting. This seems more like doubling down on "we gotta sell out our supposed values" to me?
I'd love for that to happen too. Speaking from my experience in the US, where the leaders of our "Labor" party still seem to hate the far-left more than they hate the far-right, I have my doubts. But if y'all can do it, maybe it'll inspire our leaders to find their voices too.
I'm trying to get myself to blog again, so I started reading through some of my old posts to rekindle the excitement of the old days. I hope you don't mind if I occasionally share ones that I think were pretty good. Here's one on comma splices: motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/c...
Right there with ya as a Padres fan.
Good news: he didn't disagree with Charlie if he thinks that!
I'm fine with offering forgiveness if *asked* for forgiveness. But so many of the "repentant" Trump voters getting profiled are saying "I was right to vote for them, but they're not fixing things like they said they would". They think the things they voted for would work if not for Trump's enemies
The collapse of the Iran deal was such a convenient illustration of this. The GOP told Iran: "go ahead and sign if you want, but we're ripping it up whenever we get power" And they did, and the Dems mostly just shrugged bc it's Iran, ignoring that no one else would trust us anymore either
It's this classic photograph, but in reverse. I look forward to us getting it going in the right direction again.
I just re-read the 2024 expose about Lincoln University's football team from USA Today and, hoo boy is it a wild ride! The players living out of a warehouse owned by the coach's family was one of many weird twists and turns. www.usatoday.com/story/sports...
I read, in the book "The Flavor Matrix", that the tastes of corn and vanilla go well together. As a social scientist, I felt the need to replicate this finding, and I can now confirm it. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to use this information. Open to any suggestions you might have.
Thanks for pointing that out! I missed it at first and it made me laugh out loud when I rewatched
Got blocked last night for disagreeing with someone's language prescriptions. Guess who's back, baby!!
I was researching the mythological Sirens, in order to improve a jokey metaphor. I found someone citing Cicero, who claimed that the Sirens' appeal was not their song per se, but rather their impressive knowledge and their willingness to share it with passersby. Is this a common interpretation?
Huh, apparently Dreyer blocked me for my usage? Maybe this is a more contentious preposition than I imagined. I stick by my analysis, but maybe you should check with one more person to break the tie.
Yeah, in my dialect, "of" absolutely doesn't work there. I'm guessing you're writing something like "With only a few games left in the season, there's not much margin for error"? Definitely only works as "for" for me.
I've got a pet theory similar to yours. I think some people want to be seen as liberal, because it's a more moral position. They say things like "I'm as far left as you can be, but...". So when they encounter someone (or some idea) to their left, they have to reject it or admit they're not far-left.
In use, it'd be something like "I conducted a poll and found that 43% of people eat sandwiches, with a 4% margin OF error" but "I have to be careful cutting this shelf; I'm fitting it into a 4-foot-wide alcove and there's not a lot of margin for error".
"Margin for error" is a reasonable usage, it's just for a different meaning. "Of" is when you have something but aren't able to determine its precise value (e.g., mean in a statistical analysis of data you've collected). "For" is when you don't yet have something and build in uncertainty.
Saying "Nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there" is downright idiomatic! We all know this - Rigby even moreso than those of us with less lavish travel budgets - but it just falls out of their brains when feigned ignorance is more useful.
I feel like I've been saying the same "It's not measurable but trust me!" thing about AI, but in reverse. Researchers see things like "95% accurate" and say that's good! But those 5% of failures, delivered by a magic computer that users mistake as infallible, are costly in hard to quantify ways.
You know, I don't ever seem to have written about that! I'm pretty surprised. So thanks for reminding me of this one. There's no better motivation than debunking a grammar myth that also allows me to say "actually, I *am* right!".
So thanks for getting me to learn something new in investigating an old lie!
(I found out about the contemporary usages from a quick Wikipedia check to make sure that I was remembering the dual/plural distinction correctly, and it's a good read if you're interested!) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(g...
The only thing I like about saying "alternative"/"between" => 2 and "options"/"among" => 3+ is that it introduces a feature that's cross-linguistically common but not in English: the dual/plural distinction. I forgot it existed in Old Eng, and I didn't know dual pronouns exist in some Englishes!
Thanks for the ideas! I've always had a particular hatred for that last one, plus the similar "between" vs. "among" distinction. I've (and the OED) see the distinction being about categorical vs. gradient. I wrote about it 16(!!) years ago: motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/t...
Loyola Marymount just declared its faculty union doesn’t exist anymore. Non-tenure track professors say the Catholic university walked away from bargaining talks using a religious exemption to avoid federal labor laws—something labor advocates say has never happened before.
I see people with nothing battling ICE and rich dipshits like Klein bonding with ben shapiro
When I want to SHOUT, I write in all capital letters, but some languages don't have capitals. How those languages portray shouting is just one of the many cool things I talked about with Adam Aleksic in today's podcast. Check it out! APPLE PODCASTS: bit.ly/3KazlQP SPOTIFY: bit.ly/3Io3jjQ
That's really cool. I'm a little sheepish to admit I hadn't thought about that. It reminds me of how tonal languages express intonation, vs. non-tonal languages. I enjoy listening to rock music sung with tonal lyrics to illustrate how there's both within-word and within-phrase tone structure.
"an interesting place to start a conversation" "Prove me wrong" plastered all over the tent I'm sitting under is the right way to start a conversation. Posting the edited clips up on YouTube with "Non-binary person DESTROYED with facts and logic" is a good summary of a conversation. smh
Thanks for making the first screenshot his "Never really heard much about...", because it's such a great reminder that if he cared about it, HE could've said something.
It's wild to me how ostensibly smart people cannot/could not/will not see what is so obvious. @mmasnick.bsky.social nails it. And my hunch is we'd be a better society if the Very Serious People with the Very Serious Ideas opened their fucking eyes. www.techdirt.com/2025/09/17/t...
for basically everybody working in entertainment, the news, academia; it's gotta feel like you're barely holding off count dracula and suddenly the leader of your ragrag group and all your friends around you pop their fangs
*Ezra* doesn't take the disagreements or their stakes seriously! No matter how explicitly Kirk said we can't live here with him, Klein just pretends that Kirk didn't mean these things. I won't be lectured on taking arguments seriously by people who don't take arguments seriously!
Does anyone have any grammar myths out there that I could debunk to add a bit of levity to my life? Every time I try to think about linguistic prescriptivism, I just think about the people getting fired for listing their pronouns. I need something inconsequential like "'different than' is wrong".
Wow. How could anyone so accurately describe Kirk's Watch List and say "well, he'd never do that"? I thought it was sarcasm! I haven't seen that precise of a mistake since Naomi Wolf's book based on her assumption that "death recorded" meant "executed" when it actually meant "not executed".
Every time that anyone in this administration writes something, it's so much *less* polished and coherent than you'd expect. Again, skepticism's warranted. But this sounds more like how someone who believed they'd done the right but hard thing would talk than how a Kash Patel underling would talk.
Apologies for the tangent, but your explanation helps me understand this dumb baseball problem as well. There're too many people whose stated goals conflict with the known consequences of their actions. I guess it's just a longer version of the purpose of a system is what it does. Thanks again!
Some folks replied: "As a fan, my goal is to win the championship! If he doesn't want to get booed, he needs to play better." I countered: if your goal is to win, and a guy says "cheering helps me win, booing undermines my confidence", you should cheer, because it furthers your goal... No change.
Thanks, that was far more succinct than I expected and it's pretty airtight! I've been in an ongoing argument in a baseball forum about booing your team's players when they have a bad game. A player, in an interview, said it was inspiring to get cheers and deflating to get booed.
Judging by the funding cuts & overreaction to pro-Palestinian protests at the UCs and CSUs, Newsom and the Regents might have a lower opinion of the state's universities than Trump does. Trump thinks they're dangerous foes that need shut down; Newsom thinks they're dummies replaceable by ChatGPT.
I'm not saying "don't be skeptical", but I guess I'm saying "don't be so skeptical". Maybe most young people don't talk like this. But most of them aren't confessing to murder in their text messages, either.
conservatives spend so much time harping on "small government" that I don't think enough people fully understand that all the attacks on government departments, research, and nonprofits are about eradicating anything that will have the capability to resist once the need to resist is irrefutable
I misread that headline as sarcastic! I couldn't believe the subhead. Yikes.
That makes sense to me, but I have no idea how to explain it to, e.g., the New Yorker readers I know. If you have the time sometime, I'd love to hear how you're explaining it to people who don't already see their ideas as surefire losers.
I'm more willing to care if someone shows even an inkling of regret. I'm a softie, and a barely-believable "I didn't know what Trump stood for" can trigger a little of my empathy. But "I voted for this! Why is he doing what he and I said he'd do?" while still wanting to be in charge over me? No.
Letting Chotiner make these monsters look like fools but never seeing any consequences, or even followup coverage (by the New Yorker or anyone else), feels like the biggest taunt of them all. To be an editor with that much power, having these interviews in your lap, and to say: I've done my part...
Thanks! I read it last night, and then when I read your post today, you helped me get more depth out of what the students were saying. Thank you for your insight!
There's a good article interviewing students at San Diego State after our president sent out a campus-wide email in the wake of Kirk's death. Like you said, it was clear how much fear and distrust he engendered on campus, which our administration ignores. timesofsandiego.com/politics/202...
His treatment of students was terrible. He denigrated people at every level, targeting them for his mob's justice. After he posted himself "destroying" non-binary students & posted our professors on his Professor Watch List, administrators let him waltz into our space and told us to respect him.
When I was placed on the Professor Watchlist in 2021, people sent death threats about my children. I had security officers monitor my 8yo at school. Where is all the outrage for those of us who have been targeted for years? Where is the outrage for our families? My own colleagues are silent.
I agree with you. I worry because someone who I respect for their research into the alt-right keeps pushing for the sort of restraint you're describing. But I think it's "yeah, in principle, I agree, but the horse left the stable far too long ago to worry about shutting this gate"
My rule of thumb is that, outside the limited set of tasks that IQ-style assessments are directly designed for, whatever value you gain from responsible research using intelligence metrics is outweighed by the irresponsible research/analysis that accompanies it.
I once worked with a researcher of mono vs. bilingual kids' speech pathologies, and realized that IQ-style assessments were not good at handling even that small difference.
Has anyone ever written a mea culpa for their glorification of "Hillbilly Elegy"? Speaking as white guy who grew up closer to Appalachia than Vance & also went to an Ivy League, I find it very difficult to let go of my bad feelings toward the people who venerated him like some great oracle.
I think it's because it has numbers and personally benefits him. Understanding why the research is bad requires more complex thought than "number's higher, I win!". Why would he want to put more effort into something when he fears the reward is "I'm not actually special"?
I'd screenshotted these a while ago, and when I looked back through them now to upload them, I was honestly stunned. I had remembered they were bad, but not this bad. I wish I could tell you what these meant in context, but the context doesn't help at all! It was a fascinating & terrifying read.
Sorry for ranting. I hope to turn this into a proper and more readable post if I ever do resurrect Motivated Grammar.
But if you take on the mantle of prescriptivism as a hobby, you may find that slowly morphs into yet another way to prove your own superiority, and then just a way to prove others' inferiority. We all must stay cognizant of how we drift over time, and to fight against the bad currents.
And this is why I've always thought it is is important to fight prescriptivism in all dimensions, even its more justifiable or respectable dimensions. Linguistic prescriptivism is a gateway drug. Some people (editors, for instance) can handle prescriptivism responsibly because they to it as a job.
Linguistic prescriptivism didn't die and I feel sorry for thinking it might've. Instead, it's been folded into the pervasive prescriptivism of our current society. You don't speak, look, sound, act, dress, the way that those with power do? You're toast.
The hatemongering LibsofTikTok found this woman, a Navy physician for the Navy whose crime was giving her pronouns. LoTT forwarded this to Pete Hegseth, and a man who says he doesn't wash his hands because he can't see germs fired a 21-year doctor with the tweet: "Pronouns UPDATED: She/Her/Fired."
I started this thread by saying that linguistic prescriptivism seemed dead to me, given that guys like Lamb & Gwynne were dying out. But I saw this article over the weekend, from our recently defunded local PBS station: www.kpbs.org/news/local/2...
No one writing like Lamb, or like Gwynne, respects the communicative power of language. They respect their command over it, communication be damned! And while the QES always claimed that it was just about language, it's pretty clear that Lamb & Gwynne cast themselves as valiant defenders of society.
This wasn't an old book. It was published in 2016. Its final chapter was "Opinions on the Characteristics of the Chinese, Japanese and English", and that was barely racist compared to the rest. I've added two examples of his writing; the first to show the racism, the second to show the nonsense.
I found out that he had written a genetics textbook, "Human Diversity", so I figured I'd look through it to see if he followed his rules. I stopped paying attention to the grammar three pages in. His textbook was barely comprehensible. He switched topics on a dime, with racism the only through-line.
The QES was a barely-extant group who would get occasional glowing write-ups in 2000s conservative British tabloids, prescriptivists to the core. They said they were shutting down years ago, but changed their mind. I always found it odd that their head guy (seemingly only member) was a geneticist.
Gwynne is also an ultra-conservative Catholic who writes books claiming the Pope is a pretender (look up sedevacantism). No wonder his combination of linguistic and political beliefs fit the right-wing so well. As I dug for more content, I found that the Queen's (King's) English Society survived.
He was a nobody. That is, until he happened to connect with some English ur-conservatives, and was hired to tutor their children. Suddenly he gained connections with politicians, and his book received praise from The Spectator, the headmaster of Eton, and supposedly even Prince Charles.
GG is terrible. It is prescriptivist, yet the author is a horrible writer. His lectures to the reader on how to write better are less useful than his ability to display how to write worse. I hope to make some blog posts about its advice in the future. But the key thing about Gwynne is political.
"Prescriptivism Must Die" was my motto and, well, I started to wonder if that mission had been achieved. Maybe the Dead Kennedys got their wish and the (Grammar) Nazi Punks finally did Fuck Off. I went back to my bookshelf and pulled out one book I had always meant to talk about: Gwynne's Grammar.
When I thought about restarting Motivated Grammar, it was difficult to find the same grammar gripes as when I started it in 2007. Newspapers rarely run "Kids say 'graduated high school' and it burns my beans" columns anymore. No one talks about "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" anymore.
I've been posting more than I would like about politics and AI stuff recently. I feel that it is necessary, but you also need some content about language. That's, after all, supposed to be my area of expertise. So: I had been thinking that prescriptivism was on the decline. 🧵
everyone speaks of the various social media bubbles, but MSNBC and CNN have 37,000 and 62,000 25-54 viewers respectively during the day. who the fuck cares www.adweek.com/tvnewser/wee...
Conservative notions of free speech boil down to “*I* get to say what I want, and *you* get to shut up, or be persecuted by the state.” prospect.org/education/20...
Oh, nah, my fault for misunderstanding! After people used "autism" to excuse a fascist salute, there's no way you could say something so obviously absurd that I won't believe it could be real. And this modern notion that someone with ASD behaves like a 4channer just sickens me, so I overreact.
Mamdani is the Democratic primary winner, running against a disgraced sex creep bully, a Guardian Angel, and a guy who got out of federal charges by sucking up to Trump. There's just no possible justification for Jeffries dragging his feet! The other options are absurd!
My point is: all of us choose what we say and what we don't. We often regret what we choose to say, and what we don't choose to say. I sure do. Let's not pretend that any of us are compelled to say anything, especially without prompting. Let's not pretend we think our words are meaningless.
I deleted the post. Even regular readers probably didn't see it. No one commented on it, thankfully. I had complex feelings that I wasn't mature enough to explain, about owing him credit but also despising him as a person. And rather than risk expressing my thoughts poorly, I chose discretion.
After posting it I thought back on Hitchens's life, which was Hobbesian in its nasty brutishness. He was cruel, he was misogynistic, he was racist. Whatever I had gained from him was nothing compared to what he did to others. He may have inspired me, but had I been a woman, or an Iraqi in 2003...
I think the only post I ever deleted from Motivated Grammar was a note I made about Christopher Hitchens's death. Hitchens's brand as a skeptic and an atheist influenced me in college, and arguing against orthodoxy was one of my goals with MG, so I thought it was appropriate to offer a short eulogy.