British Tennis Forum - Celebrating 20 Years!

Stircrazy · Tennis legend

The weird & wonderful world of English grammar...

christ · Challenger qualifying

"bared no weight"? Seriously?

Stircrazy · Tennis legend

christ wrote:in
"bared no weight"? Seriously?

That's what I simply could not fathom, whichever way I looked at it, & what prompted my request for a translation in the complaint e-mail. My "evidence-based" point was entirely by the by, but I just couldn't resist adding it!

I'm not even sure why I bothered reading the article, such was my incredulity at Trump's claim.

Stircrazy · Tennis legend

Here's another error (actually two) any self-respecting schoolboy/-girl should know better than to make (taken from the Beeb's live text commentary on the Ryder Cup):

An enormous Stars and Stripes flag is draped between two fire ladders - loaned from the local Farmingdale station - when they head from the 14th green to the 15th tee.

I give up - again! Oh, & I'm getting sick & tired of seeing "X drains [i.e. holes] his putt", a curiously unimaginative phrase I've never seen before. That said, I don't really follow golf, so maybe it's been in use for some time.

Stircrazy · Tennis legend

Now the Beeb thinks that "deteriorate" (cf. fourth paragraph, or rather, the fifth sentence, as its hacks seem to think that one sentence = one paragraph!) is a transitive verb! Lazy, ignorant - or both? disbelief And if I had a pound for every example of "neither...or" I saw on the site, I'd be a rich woman! furious

christ · Challenger qualifying

There being two players in a pair in doubles led me to this brain-teaser on the BBC:

There are five British players ranked inside the world's top 10. All [five] of them reached the last four of the season-ending ATP Finals

Stircrazy · Tennis legend

christ wrote:
There being two players in a pair in doubles led me to this brain-teaser on the BBC:

There are five British players ranked inside the world's top 10. All [five] of them reached the last four of the season-ending ATP Finals

I'd say I give up, but I did that ages ago!

Stircrazy · Tennis legend

OUP word of the year ("rage bait", in case you can't be bothered to click on the link). In addition to a definition of the term & of the two runners-up ("aura farming" & "biohack" confuse ), there are brief comments & links at the end of the article to the Cambridge Dictionary word of the year ("parasocial") & that chosen by Collins ("vibe coding"). Hmm... I must say I'm really rather glad that I have nowt to do with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X or any other pointless social media feed. 21st century-speak is clearly passing me by, going over my head or whatever. With the exception of "parasocial", I'd never heard of any of them! It won't be long before I don't understand a word of what I hear/read from anyone other than my friends & acquaintances. furious cry

christ · Challenger qualifying

I don't know about anything else, but "word of the year" is a concept that seems to have passed me by, as has anything "social media" related.

I think that I am rapidly becoming unsuited to the world, linguistically, grammatically and politically - it's a good thing that I am older than dirt.

JonH comes home · Tennis legend

christ wrote:
I don't know about anything else, but "word of the year" is a concept that seems to have passed me by, as has anything "social media" related.

I think that I am rapidly becoming unsuited to the world, linguistically, grammatically and politically - it's a good thing that I am older than dirt.

But if you are who you purport to be, surely it is in your control to change it all?!

christ · Challenger qualifying

JonH comes home wrote:
christ wrote:
I don't know about anything else, but "word of the year" is a concept that seems to have passed me by, as has anything "social media" related.

I think that I am rapidly becoming unsuited to the world, linguistically, grammatically and politically - it's a good thing that I am older than dirt.
But if you are who you purport to be, surely it is in your control to change it all?!

Small "c".

JonH comes home · Tennis legend

christ wrote:
JonH comes home wrote:
christ wrote:
I don't know about anything else, but "word of the year" is a concept that seems to have passed me by, as has anything "social media" related.

I think that I am rapidly becoming unsuited to the world, linguistically, grammatically and politically - it's a good thing that I am older than dirt.
But if you are who you purport to be, surely it is in your control to change it all?!
Small "c".

Small changes, then? biggrin

Stircrazy · Tennis legend

christ wrote:
I don't know about anything else, but "word of the year" is a concept that seems to have passed me by, as has anything "social media" related.

I think that I am rapidly becoming unsuited to the world, linguistically, grammatically and politically - it's a good thing that I am older than dirt.

I suspect, Chris, that you & I may just about be on the same, or a similar, wavelength!

While I'm at it, here's another example of current mindless, meaningless "yoof-speak" that flabbered my gast when I stumbled across it last week in a Beeb report on Two-Tier's clowning about with a class of primary schoolchildren in Peterborough. As is so often the case, it seems to have originated across the Pond. furious

Stircrazy · Tennis legend

I make no apology for publicising this fascinating comment piece on the negative aspects of AI in today's Times by Kathleen Stock, the former Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex who was forced to resign following a campaign by its students, who had taken exception to her views on gender identification & transgender rights.

Stircrazy · Tennis legend

Stircrazy wrote:
I make no apology for publicising this fascinating comment piece on the negative aspects of AI in today's Times by Kathleen Stock, the former Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex who was forced to resign following a campaign by its students, who had taken exception to her views on gender identification & transgender rights.

P.S. Posted here largely because of these two paragraphs:

To produce text, chatbots rely upon large language models, or LLMs: computational networks that learn patterns from exposure to huge amounts of data. A recent article in The New York Times analyses the deathless prose of LLMs in some depth. Alongside grammatical tics, there are vocabulary giveaways. One such word is "delves", common in Nigerian English but now present in thousands of academic texts in the biomedical sciences too.

Another telltale phrase is "I rise to speak". By August, this Americanism had appeared almost five times more often in UK parliamentary speeches than in the previous year. It seems AI is no respecter of regional borders. If a word or phrase is popular in the massive datasets it mines for content, chances are it will eventually pop up in your repertoire too.

Fascinating... I think this is the NYT article to which Professor Stock refers, but you may have to jump through a few hoops, e.g. setting up an account for limited access, as I did, to gain access to it - if you're interested. It closes with this paragraph (inevitably in Americanese):

Maybe soon, the gap will close. A.I.s have spent the last few years watching and imitating us, scraping the planet for data to digest and disgorge, but humans are mimics as well. A recent study from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development analyzed more than 360,000 YouTube videos consisting of extemporaneous talks by flesh-and-blood academics and found that A.I. language is increasingly coming out of human mouths. The more we're exposed to A.I., the more we unconsciously pick up its tics, and it spreads from there. Some of the British parliamentarians who started their speeches with the phrase ("I rise to speak" probably hadn't used A.I. at all. They had just noticed that everyone around them was saying it and decided that maybe they ought to do the same. Perhaps that day will come for us, too. Soon, without really knowing why, you will find yourself talking about the smell of fury and the texture of embarrassment. You, too, will be saying "tapestry." You, too, will be saying "delve."