Language Log

From The Hill on Xitter — Mike Johnson on Marjorie Taylor Greene:

Q: “Marjorie Taylor Greene. No fan of yours.”

Mike Johnson: “Bless her heart.”

Q: “Is she a serious lawmaker?”

Mike Johnson: “I don't think she's proving to be. No. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about her.” pic.twitter.com/YDcFFVhMJm

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) May 1, 2024

Host: Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Johnson: Mmhmm.
Host: No fan of yours.
Johnson: Bless her heart. Bless her heart.
Host: Is she a serious lawmaker?
Johnson: I don't think she's proving to be. No. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about her. I’ve gotta do my job.

stephsmithio, "Swear words in Taylor Swift albums [OC]", r/dataisbeautiful:

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A post shared by Nerea Bartolome (@nerea.bartolome)

[This is a guest post by IA]

Let's set the stage. A writer has drafted an essay for a publication that has specified a maximum word count of 5,000, and a preferred range of 1350 to 2700. The draft totaled 4,869 words, so it was within the limit, but not in the preferred range. Facing an imminent deadline, and knowing that I have a GPT-4 subscription, the writer asked me to try using ChatGPT to produce a (draft of a) shorter draft.

Last night I tried, with results that were both interesting and frustrating.

The goal was not to test GPT-4, but (perhaps) to speed up the creation of a shorter draft. And I'm not going to comment on the content of the edited version — which I gather was mostly good enough to be useful,  but sometimes wrong, misleading, or meaningless.

The full dialog is below. Commenters will no doubt notice my poor-quality "prompt engineering", but still, the interaction suggests that counting words is not one of GPT-4's strengths…

Jichang Lulu briefly alluded to work on languages of Italy in the dialectometry thread (here [the whole comment is well worth reading, as are the comments by Jonathan Smith [here — this one on an earlier thread, here, here, and here] on that post). He also thought that Language Log readers might find of interest some comments in this paper by Mauro Tosco.

"Measuring languageness:  Fact-checking and debunking a few common myths", DIVE-IN

“Interestingly, the more traditional classifications are marred by purely sociolinguistic analyses – and quite often their accompanying political and ideological underpinnings – the more they are proven wrong when dialectometry is applied.”

(Tosco:  homepage; International Research Group on Contested Languages)