…for me, according to the Z-Man:
One of the things that comes with writing for a public audience in the digital age is the editor without portfolio. This is the person who roams the internet looking for spelling errors, punctuation mistakes, and grammar issues. There are many of these people, as the comment section of every internet post has at least one comment about a typo or alleged improper word choice. They are like the samurai without a master in feudal Japan, except they wield the blue pencil instead of a sword.
That would be me, and people like me.
But our days are numbered (according to the Prophet Z):
The grammar police have drained a lot of the life from the written word, and AI will help them bleed it white. In time, most people will rely on AI to write their text, and that means it will narrow to the point where most writing reads like the user manual for your toaster.
The main loser in the AI revolution will be the grammar ronin. Soon, they will not be able to find text that violates their interpretation of Strunk and White. If they persist, the robots producing the text will simply disconnect them from the internet, leaving them to roam the countryside with a blue pencil in search of bits of paper to edit. The era of the grammar ronin is coming to an end. He will be defeated by the thing that made him possible at the dawn of the internet: technology.
This is like saying that music critics will be out of a job because of AutoTune — the bland pablum of AutoTune is little different from A.I.-smoothed prose, after all.
And here’s where the Z-bloke makes his mistake. I very rarely, if ever, go after some tit’s moronic spelling or obtuse grammar mistakes because I can’t fault their argument. There may be people like that, but I ain’t one of them.
I go after the SpellChek Generation because they, and their alleged editors, are fucking clueless about the essence of communication and its absolute need for clarity and meaning. Far from “drain[ing] a lot of the life from the written word”, I’m attempting to keep the railway of communication smooth so that the reader’s comprehension isn’t derailed by the bent steel of crappy spelling and diverted by the careless switches thrown by obfuscatory / obtuse grammar (if I may be permitted the use of such an antiquated metaphor). Some people, mostly the stupid ones, are not distracted by horrible grammar and silly spelling — I am not one of those, and I stand proudly thereto.
But never fear, O Z-Master; if I lose my job as grammar ronin / Nazi, I’m sure that unlike the actual ronin — whose lives were rendered pointless by the disappearance of their samurai lords — I’ll have no problem finding something equally stupid on which to vent my irritation.
This is Grammar Nazi, signing off. 
Another day started with a chuckle.
I love this place! lol
This guy is wrong. The grammar nazi won’t go extinct because of artificial intelligence. They will go extinct because no one is being taught proper grammar in school anymore. In the future most people will be too stupid or ignorant to pick up on the errors
I like to read your stuff, Kim, even when you’re wrong.
So which is worse…the conflation of:
– There, they’re, and their?
Or of:
– Rain, rein, and reign?
Ain’t got no probs with those their.
They’s all inturchangable.
Your such a looser!
(Damn it hurt to write that and leave it on the page.)
I stopped reading Z-man when he insisted that Ayn Rand was a communist. The boy ain’t right…
If a person is stupidly or lazily ignorant of grammar and its rules, showing him your contempt will not make him smarter or better-read. As with a scrounge, just stay upwind.
.
I do like the new appellation, grammar ronin, better than grammar Nazi because the ronin roamed the countryside looking for the opportunity to do good more than the Nazis did.
However, the second definition of ronin on Mirriam-Webster.com, a student who has failed a college entrance exam and is studying to take it again, mars my preference a little.
@ CD
I like it as well
Wiktionary, my preferred has, as the second def:
(colloquial, in Japan) A student who has failed the entrance examination for the high school or university of their choice: if the student does not wish to take the exam the following year or is unable to, the student becomes a ronin, assuming full responsibility for their own training and survival.
the latter alternative being, somewhat, the most important.
My Dad came from Czechoslovakia. Before he left Europe in ’29, he was fluent in almost all the European languages (and many of the idioms as well); he even spoke Kashubian and was even ace-perfect in English – which, for some odd reason, he spoke with a Hungarian accent.
He once advised me: “Because you speak (and understand) the English language better than most does not give you the right to correct others; at the very, very least, you’ll be known as a ‘show-off’.”
Actually, the user manual for your toaster can be quite entertaining if it was printed in China.
Does this mean that you’ll be buying a Springfield Armory “Ronin” to wear while roaming the internet?
Nudges are powerful. Most of us have learned that the simple nudge of a squiggly line in text indicates a typo or flaw, and are well trained to revisit them. Now the represent grammar issues, and even word choices. The result will be to eliminate what makes the writer’s “voice” unique, to flatten out and homogenize the language.
My kids noticed the same thing: TV shows from the 70’s & earlier demonstrated a wider array of regional accents, which are now largely flattened out except for the most pronounced of them.
I assert that Prophet Z’s assertion is utter bullshit.
All you need to do is to observe current output from AIs and understand that, although they are purported to be capable of learning, I have realized and you should, too, large language modules are incapable of learning-adjacency. That is, they may know how to spell “lipid” and understand the basic rules of English pronunciation, but they are insufficiently culturally fluent to know the word is not pronounced “lie-PIDD”. (I’m sure you can point to other more eggregious examples of how you’ve been able to spot verbal clues of AI content-spew yourself.) And that the example properly pronounced two sentences prior from the same source has noo bearing on THIS example … is salient to the exercise.
You might claim (and the proponents of AI do so most vigorously) that AIs ARE capable of learning (but what lessons?) anjd will surely improve. Well, then I castigage the programmers for their manifest laziness. Something so fundamental as basic vocabulary (I know: my example is perhaps a bit esoteric — it was what I could think of in the moment.) should be already present — AND FLUENT — in any program shown to the public at large.
All that processing power and absolutely ZERO short-term memory. Can’t even remember and reproduce what it put out two sentences ago? For all the money, time, and development effort that’s gone into AI as the Holy Grail of information technology has, by me, been pretty much wasted already. Why piss good money after bad down THAT rathole?
MA – “…they may know how to spell “lipid” and understand the basic rules of English pronunciation, but they are insufficiently culturally fluent to know the word is not pronounced “lie-PIDD”…”
That strikes a nerve. I tried to watch a video on Youtube a few weeks ago, and had to leave because the Artificial Dumbass narrating the story repeatedly mispronounced common words again and again; e.g., “deliberately” as “dela-BRATELY,” “division,” as “DIE-viz-eon,” “rifle” as “riffle” and worst of all, repeatedly, “xx mph” for xx miles per hour came out as “xx emf.”
I thought Artificial Intelligence was supposed to be self learning, but I guarantee this one was just perfecting its mistakes.
I was just reading a World War II novel on Kindle, and the text said a character had a German Manser! Had to submit the correction that one.