I wrote extensively about this for Mondo 2000: (http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-s...)
> In our analysis we treat words with equivalent meanings but with different spellings (e.g. color versus colour) as distinct words...
I think it's a bit of a stretch to use that to say that English lexicon is shrinking. The number of different spellings for the same words is, yes, but that's not necessarily bad. Other articles suggest that English vocabulary is still steadily growing: https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2016/fe...
I think you made good points regarding QuickType though.
It might be the way around. This kind of intellectual homogenization might indicate an emergent entity coming to being - some kind of (new?) societal organism, sort of like national state, but I don't know what it actually is this time. We might never learn.
Memes would be the basic building blocks of any organism that emerged from the manner in which replicated ideas collectively reacted to the environment. Arguably this describes human culture, though I think that's a long way from exhibiting independent intelligence (but maybe we'd be incapable of recognizing it).
Presumably something could emerge from the collective interaction of such meme-based organisms. Though like with ants, where the phenomena of an anthill can also be understood directly in terms of genes (all the ants are siblings), I suspect it could really just be reduced to the interplay of mutually reinforcing memes.
I wonder what the analog to delineating the internal and external environment is in the meme-based universe....
The communication with bots and computer systems that are designed to interact with humans and equipped with the so-called "AI" is of similar nature: it seems there is some exchange, but it's very shallow and limited by the abilities of the receiving end - you can never transmit anything new, anything that the system is unable to understand. Continued use of such systems might have hard to predict consequences.
One of the examples used to illustrate the point was beavers' dams. So 'meme' always did exactly mean persistent phenomena like anthills and tuna shoals (although 'collective animals' would be a subcategory, it referred to more than just those). The word has recently been semantically narrowed into meaning 'a picture on the internet with some words on it'; sadly, in my opinion. The original meaning was much more interesting and useful as it ties in with Darwinism, or the theory of evolution applied more broadly and to things which aren't necessarily biological organisms.
Apparently Dawkins isn't bothered by it himself though and likes the current usage (or so I read somewhere).
I just chose shows as an example. But I feel the same happens with reading, music, technology, politics, etc.
So this alleged culling of the lexicon by the spellchecker is largely a shakeout of non-words.
Firefox's edit widget is underlining "spellchecker" in red, but I'm hitting [reply] anyway. I don't think it needs a hyphen that badly.
I really wonder how global language will change over the next century. I would really like to know if English continues to borrow from other languages or all these dictionaries are going to stop that.
<meta property="og:description" content="Mondo 2000 The original magazine of cyberculture returns. Watch out for your overcoats!" />
Which was actually more helpful than the twitter or facebook bio texts :P
It's mostly manageable on a laptop because it's easy to go back and edit text and make your computer behave. On a phone it's ducking^Wducking^Wfucking infuriating because you can automatically get the same correction a good two or three times before you can get the word you want, and you are very actively fighting a tool that is trying too hard to help, to the point it will deliberately misinterpret your keypress if it thinks it has a better idea of what you wanted to type.
Only fix I've found is to manually make the word a shortcut for itself (e.g. shortcut "its" for "its") so that when I type the word it inserts itself and is not auto-corrected.
;)
that's why we need them :-P
I recently saw a signature board for honor students posted at a high school. The signatures from the early 1990s were all in cursive and every signature had its own style. The signatures from 2017 were mostly printed in block letters and looked like something a first or second grader would have written. It was pretty sad.
At least, until some Doomsday scenario arrives.
If you don't learn the meaning of words and how to spell them, and how to construct a grammatically correct sentence without the assistance of a computer, you become mentally weak just as you become physically weak if you never exercise your muscles.
Students are losing the ability to think. The ability to think is what is being fundamentally eroded by this sort of automation. Nobody tries to solve problems. They just reflexively google the question, or ask Siri or Alexa, and accept the first answer without giving a lot of thought to whether it even makes sense. I've caught myself doing it.
More and more we are having our worldview formed not by critical thinking and development of our own opinions, but by what Google and other big media companies tell us.
> Composing text deliberately by hand forces a more measured pace of thought and development of ideas
Penmanship is orthogonal to the ability to write by hand. I for example have atrocious hand writing and can still easily write my thoughts down, and often do. Other's will have trouble with my written notes, but they're not meant for external consumption, I type for that purpose. Cursive versus print style writing are mostly interchangeable for writing down ideas, and learning to write well in cursive takes up to a few years. It may not be time well spent.
> I've even heard educators say that it's not worth teaching arithmetic anymore because everyone has a computer, or a phone with a calculator.
I know a number of teachers, and try to follow trends in US education, and I've never encountered this idea. Are you sure you aren't constructing a straw man here?
> Spelling is also not given much importance these days, with "creative" spelling being acceptable at least through the elementary grades. Even in high school it isn't given a lot of weight.
At least in the US, this is not the case. Any state that uses the Common Core follows these [1] standards, including phonics, building words from stems, and differentiation of homophones.
>If you don't learn the meaning of words
Who's saying anything about this? This tech looks like it just guesses at the banal pleasantries you type at friends and colleagues 1000s of times per year. I know I write the same phrases almost to exhaustion, I'd love to autocomplete the trivial stuff, and spare my hands an wrists. *note there's a great accessibility story here, where people with manual impairments will be able to answer emails more easily.
> Students are losing the ability to think.
Are they really? I'm not sure there's any evidence of this actually happening.
> More and more we are having our worldview formed not by critical thinking and development of our own opinions, but by what Google and other big media companies tell us.
How is this any different than mass media dissemination of information from the previous generation, when everyone watched the same 4 TV channels and read the same 1 or 2 newspapers.
[1]https://www.spelling-words-well.com/common-core-standards.ht...
It is relieving the human of the work of actually thinking about what they want to say and how they want to say it-- that's the thing that the human should be doing, and needs to know how to do to be an effective thinker and an effective participant in society.
How a person speaks and writes tells you about how they think-- that is what language does; it opens a window into the mind of another person. With this tool, I am no longer looking into the mind of my conversation partner, I am looking into the mind of some sophisticated statistical aggregate of a huge population of Google users.
This kind of thing is a huge insult and injury to human communication.
My phone-thumb-typing voice is different to my laptop voice is different to my handwritten voice. I can’t prove this but I believe it is true.
And of course this new development is actually proposing phrases. This seems really new.
I think children these days do not appreciate the art of text.
They may have had fabulous penmanship but I could tap out Morse code faster than they could type.