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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 19h

I was arguing yesterday with someone who insisted that ICE wasn't a problem; I was falling for media lies and he's never been harassed by them.

He kept trying to convince me that the real problem with the government was that he had to pay $6k in property taxes on a $400k house. You nailed it.

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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 19h

I fell in love with this sentence as soon as I read it. It's such a good example of a sentence that is syntactically ambiguous but pragmatically unambiguous. I know what it means, but I also get to pretend it means that this person has never met their newborn. What a delight!

Text that says "I now know a few books I'll be buying for my newborn that I'd never heard of before."

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Tom Freeman @tomfreeman.bsky.social · 2d

"Ethnicity" is something that happens to other people

Saul Staniforth @saulstaniforth.bsky.social · 2d

"You go to some places like Handsworth.. parts of Dewsbury, Bradford, Leicester, where you see.. a single ethnicity.. we don't think that's healthy thing"

Kevin Hollinrake is MP for Thirsk and Malton, which according to the 2021 census is 98% white.

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Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 3d

It's true. The Oxford comma, often said to eliminate ambiguity, can sometimes increase it. It’s not a panacea, and writers and editors shouldn’t treat it as one
stancarey.wordpress.com/2017/04/21/t...

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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 2d

Interesting hypothesis, definitely makes sense. I wonder if it's also that, as a radio host, you have to internally censor to make sure you're not accidentally saying/doing anything inappropriate. That persistent overcarefulness in language feels similar to prescriptivism; I could see it extending.

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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 2d

In this case, though, "these people" was a writer at the New York Times. It may be comforting to think that such beliefs stem from ignorance, but the truth is that highly-educated people delight in cruelty at least as much as anyone else. Even more so, in my experience.

Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 2d

He and his ilk have paid lip service that "diversity" is good, but that every effort ever undertaken to do anything to encourage it is poorly implemented or overvalued. It's only recently that they've been confident enough to be explicitly anti-diversity. Here's a 2000s quote from Hegseth:

Notes from the Publisher (Pete Hegseth '03 as an undergrad at Princeton):

[I'm skipping to the relevant part:] All this talk of "diversity" has diverted Princeton from its original academic focus: Western civilization and the curious combination of Socrates and Christ, strength and humility, democracy and piety, Athens and Jerusalem. Diversity is a note-worthy discussion topic, yet highly overvalued at this University.

Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 2d

One problem with there being more people named Gabriel now than in the past is that there are more embarrassing people named Gabriel, too.

But at least it means people screw up my name less.

Kelsey Atherton @atherton.bsky.social · 3d

That's a reason to not release the product, to not even make the product. If your lawyers advised it was okay to release the product, fire them. If you did not have lawyers to say this, fire the person who said you didn't need lawyers, hire some, then fire your whole team and pull the product.

gabriel &
@GabrielPeterss4
• • •
we are working hard on fixing unnecessary content violations on sora 2!! bear with us, we are a small team!
2:09 PM • Oct 6, 2025 • 13.7K Views

Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 2d

I sometimes worry, because a number of my early influences into linguistics turned out to be bad people. I wonder if it's something about me, something about academia, or just the usual bad apples. Thankfully, my later influences all seem to be really admirable role models, so it's (probably) fine..

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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 2d

Yeah... There're a few papers I refer to in my classes with disclaimers, because I don't trust the authors as people, so it's hard to trust them as researchers.

And it's hard to imagine his connection to Epstein was just a consultation, given the picture of those two and Larry Krauss at a dinner.

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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 2d

arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/d...

Apparently, Deloitte used an LLM to help them write an analysis for the Australian government, got found out because a researcher reading the report realized some of the citations were fake, and Deloitte is only *partially* refunding the government. This sucks.

Deloitte will refund Australian government for AI hallucination-filled report

Consulting firm quietly admitted to GPT-4o use after fake citations were found in August.

arstechnica.com

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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 3d

But the older you get, the more you lose track of the new advances. The world pays you more and more to be right, and yet you slowly become more and more wrong as science gets better. You have to work to regain your intellectual humility and curiosity. Or... you don't, and you become Pinker.

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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 3d

At some point, after decades of telling people that you're right and they're wrong (even in the supportive context of teaching!), you internalize that. It's not longer that your ideas are right because you carefully studied them; it's that they are right because they are yours and you are right.

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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 3d

I keep Steven Pinker in my mind as a cautionary tale. "Words & Rules" was one of the books that first got me into psycholinguistics. A friend and I were delighted to go to a talk by him in my undergrad years.

The trouble with being a professor is that you're paid to know more than everyone else.

flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 4d

If your considered analysis is that everyone has gone completely mad except for you, then is it likely that’s what happened? Or is it you that is the arse here.

Rob Henderson © @robkhenderson • 11h
"the left has allowed itself to become shackled by unpopular luxury beliefs: abolishing the police, opening the borders, the corruption of female-only spaces. Everyone has gone mad...associated with the observable decline in literacy across the rich West"

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Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 3d

The Sora AI disinfo nightmare is here

For more like this:
tiktok.com/@drewharwell
instagram.com/bydrewharwell

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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 4d

I'm always shocked when the Kids Today *do* know the music I do. One day my local coffee shop was playing songs that could've come from one of the mixtapes I recorded from the radio in 1997, and I realized the baristas hadn't even been born then. Hadn't felt that old in a while!

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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 5d

Ah, great! I apologize for misunderstanding. Today I had a helpline AI chatbot respond to my description of a problem with something like "I understand how frustrating that can be" and I was so mad. I appreciate a human saying that to me. I don't appreciate a human programming something to say it.

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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 5d

But they specifically said it *didn't* set a precedent! How could it possibly have any effect on us now? [sarcasm]

Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 5d

Wow, that was a depressing (but enlightening!) rabbithole to fall down.

Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 5d

And so the rest of us must be very very clear that they are not humans, nor even animate. They do not deserve respect. This isn't like sexism or racism, where the differences aren't real. The differences ARE real. If people stop treating LLMs like humans, folks like me will stop being mean to them.

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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 5d

It's useful to be "mean" to and about LLMs is because they are designed by humans to mimic humanity in order to manipulate us. We have seen this since the Eliza Effect in the 60s; we assume that anything that acts sentient must be sentient. LLMs aren't! But disreputable people act like they are.

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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 5d

That's how I felt when everyone thought it was really funny to do the "gingers don't have souls" stuff back in the 2010s. Heck, "ginger" is even a scrambled version of the N-word! But those are people. You're claiming that it's bigotry to dehumanize something that people *incorrectly* humanize.

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Prescriptivism Must Die! @mgrammar.bsky.social · 5d

Well, that's a compelling reason to stop using LLMs, then. What benefits do we get from them that outweigh the loss of our humanity that they lead us into?

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Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa @benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · 5d

It really is striking how much they want us to see images of their own brutality. The pretense of being anything but a exercise in violence has all but disappeared.

Raider @iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social · 5d

Gestapo posting about their work.

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Paul T. Levin @paultlevin.bsky.social · 5d

““They dragged little Greta [Thunberg] by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag. They did everything imaginable to her, as a warning to others,” the Turkish activist ErsinÇelik, a participant in the Sumud flotilla, told Anadolu news agency.”+

Israel accused of detaining Greta Thunberg in infested cell and making her hold flags

Activist tells Swedish officials she has been subjected to harsh treatment, including insufficient food and water

www.theguardian.com

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