AI isn’t the greatest threat to language, apathy is – The Telegraph
The national lexicon may evolve but grammar must remain fixed for the common good
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Oh dear. The English language is in terminal decline. Shocking, I know; who’da thunk it? Apart from Scotsman of letters James Beattie in 1785, who fretted it was “degenerating very fast”. Oh and Irishman of letters Jonathan Swift in 1715: “Most of the Books we see now a-days, are full of… Manglings and Abbreviations.”
Swift felt the purity of the language peaked during the Elizabethan period; no mean feat given that as far back as the 14th century English chronicler and Benedictine monk Ranulf Higden proclaimed that due to intermingling with Danes and Normans “the language of the land is harmed and some use strange inarticulate utterance, chattering, snarling and harsh teeth-gnashing”.
By way of an update, medieval teeth-gnashing over the spoken word has now been replaced by hand-wringing over its written equivalent. A full 77 per cent of those surveyed by language-learning platform Babbel.com feel that British (aka proper) English was being Americanised by AI programmes. In addition, 51 per cent of respondents admitted they had stopped using punctuation marks like semicolons and Oxford commas because they were too “AI-like”.
I’m all for ditching Oxford commas because they are, let me think… ah yes, stupid. But the extinction of our precious native semicolons doesn’t bear thinking about. It’s easy to blame AI of course. It can blame itself in 240 languages. Easy but lazy. And as we all know, laziness is a distinctly human rather than technological trait.
Which is to say the fault lies not in our stars or even the Cloud but in ourselves. On the one hand we have sold out centre for center and bandy about “awesome” like college kids on a spring break, yet on the other we are too timid to use splendidly expressive long dashes – in case our writing looks AI-generated.
It wasn’t always so. Me, I’m old enough to remember when Google (which was originally named the very much creepier “BackRub”) was a rather snippy stickler for grammar and a bit scoldy to boot. Yes, children, long long ago, around the turn of the millennium, if you slapdashily typed in, say, “Queens Jubilee”, it would passive-aggressively enquire “Did you mean Queen’s Jubilee”, which of course you did. Your bad.
Sure it was humiliating, but it also felt like the search engine was making us better, more literate people. Until of course the Silicon Valley programmerati decided they weren’t that into self-improvement and binned it. Now you can enter any sort of gobbledegook and it will guess correctly – because, and I don’t care what anyone says, your phone really is listening to every word you say. How else did I mention Birmingham in conversation and immediately get a nudge from Booking.com to literally get a room?
But back to language. There are some who believe usage is sovereign and we should accept that language and even grammar is dynamic rather than fixed. They are wrong. They are probably also the kind of people who say nonsensical things like “no worries” instead of “you’re welcome”.
Yes the national lexicon evolves. I’m still all about the rizz and I frankly love the Gen-Z term “delulu”, as in delusional. But grammar, like the guard rail on a car ferry, is immutable. It’s there for the common good; you might not think it’s for you, but when you need it, you absolutely do. It’s how we communicate, how we understand one another and why Eats, Shoots & Leaves is an international punctuation bestseller and not a Tarantino movie.
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