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Comment by bitxbitxbitcoin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Here are some. I typed them just for you.

> 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!

English is the only big language that doesn't have a recognized standardization body.

The thing with standardisation bodies is that as much as certain organisations and journals can have their grammar mandated, regular folk will still continue to evolve the language as it does. For example, The Academie and French teachers would like you to use "nous" for "we", but it's been slowly creeping over to "on". No amount of browbeating is going to stop a French teen saying "le weekend"

I think that example's more a practicality of pronunciation. The two vowels in ce est are the same, and French runs the vowels together between words, so you'd end up pronouncing it the same either way.

That's not to say that you must always speak with perfect grammar all the time. You can play around with things for humour, character, rhetorical effect all day long.

Completely agree. I don't think my writing style has changed much, but there are times when I think of writing a sentence and then reconsider because "it sounds too much like AI to me". Scary!

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...

Not accurate. Webster didn't originate the American dialect; it had been developing since the English first settled here.

Webster provided a common reference for the American dialect: he helped unify the dialect. Or partly unify: "Redd up your room annat" isn't comprehensible in most American cities, but is still proper English in Pittsburgh. (Of course, nowadays better dictionaries probably list "redd" and "annat", even if they're not used across all of the US.)

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

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