Comment by bitxbitxbitcoin
4 days ago
I feel the conformity creeping in just from reading more LLM generated or edited text. The only way to counter I can think of is to read as much olde literature as possible, and/or to fully embrace whatever slang the young jits are yeeting into existence nowadays.
Embrace the esoteric! Grammar and sentence structure are but mear suggestions when everything I author can be claimed free form written poetry. The counter culture is humanity, we can be the embodiment.
I do agree though. Finding actual strung together words by humans is not easy these days.
> Grammar and sentence structure are but mear suggestions
Learning French has been eye opening, in that many grammatical structures that are optional in English are compulsory in French. Abbreviations for example: “it is” or “it’s” are both valid in English, but in French you’re not supposed to say “ce est”, you have to say “c’est”.
English has places where one or the other is preferred. For example one, would normally write, “It is with great regret…,” without the contraction. It’s not a hard rule, more a matter of register. Similarly, in the preceding sentence, “it is” would seem overly formal.
Damn French, they ruined French!
/s
Here are some. I typed them just for you.
Dictionaries have been trying to retard linguistic progress since the first edition of one tried to nail down every meaning of a term.
Interestingly, you can trace “American” English becoming its own thing [1] to the publication of the first Webster dictionary that made a conscious effort to simplify spelling. American and British dialects have been diverging ever since (although British has been becoming more American since the turn of the millennium).
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figures?id=10.1371...
I disagree. Dictionaries are mostly descriptive as opposed to prescriptive. They wouldn’t be particularly useful if they weren’t.
That being said, I have seen people weaponize dictionary definitions if that’s what you were referring to.
I believe that is a more recent phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster%27s_Third_New_Internat...
Now there's a damn dense joke, bravo