Language Log

It's been clear for a while that "large language models" can be prompted to fulfill writing assignments, and that LLM detection doesn't work, and that "watermarking" won't come to the rescue. There's lots of on-going published discussion, and even more discussion in real life.

As documented by the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI, the conclusion seems to be a combination of bringing AI explicitly into the class, and designing some assignments where students need to function without it.

In one recent example, Joe Moxley has posted the syllabus for his course "Writing with Artificial Intelligence – Syllabus (ENC 3370)".

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-sixth issue:  “The Tang as a Tuoba Dynasty” (pdf) by Sanping Chen.

ABSTRACT

By examining the record of a local anti-Tibetan rebellion in document scroll S.1438 from the Dunhuang “library cave,” this discussion demonstrates that the nomadic Tuoba origin of the Tang royal house was known not only to the ancient Turkic people, as shown by their name for the Tang, Tabγač, but also to the Tang subjects themselves. In addition to substantiating Paul Pelliot’s old assertion that the Old Turkic name Tabγač came from the name Tuoba, this work argues that the Tang dynasty was in many aspects indeed the continuation of its Tuoba predecessors.

Now I read
that J D Vance said he was
"really disturbed"
by teachers
who don't have
biological children.
Well for a long time
Tim and I were teachers
who struggled with infertility.
And we were only able to start a family
because of fertility treatments.
So this is really personal.
we do not take kindly to folks
like J D Vance telling us
when
or how
to start our family.
So let me use my Teacher Voice.
English teachers, you know what these
((babies are for)).
Mister Vance,
how about you mind your own business?

Eric Doty dueling with Grammarly on LinkedIn:

me: in real time
grammarly: in real-time

me: k, in real-time
grammarly: in real time

me: i'm going to smash you in real time
grammarly: i'm going to smash you in real-time

From Frederick Newmeyer:

I recently had to cancel a flight with Delta Airlines and was directed to their webpage that discusses what to do to get a refund. I found the following bizarre instruction:

Please retain the ticket/document number(s) below as they have become an eCredit and the remaining value can be used to rebook a flight within one year or more from the original purchase date.

What on earth does ‘within one year or more’ mean? Taken literally, it means that I could rebook a flight five years from now, but they can’t possibly mean that. All attempts to get an explanation from Delta have failed. Can anybody explain what ‘within one year or more’ might mean?

Today's Dinosaur Comics:

Mouseover title: “this has TREMENDOUS implications for my two original characters, Anna Phora and E. P. Strophe”

This is something I was going to write about in the early part of December, 2023, but got sidetracked by too many other things.  Now I'm going through my e-mail clutter to clean out old messages that I had neglected to take care of back then.  At that time, more than half a year ago, "PUA" was still very popular.  Although speech fashions change rapidly in China, it was so viral then that I suspect it is still relevant today, so let's take a good look at it.

When I first encountered "PUA", I had no idea what it meant nor how to pronounce it (the same sort of feeling of being at sea when I initially heard "hawk tuah"), so I started looking around for what it might mean.  Clearly, from the contexts in which I was hearing it, PUA was not "Pandemic Unemployment Assistance", which was a federal and state government program back in the day.

I fairly quickly came to the realization that the term "PUA" is derived from the American English phrase “pick-up artist”.  Well, I'd never heard of that either, so had to educate myself about that too.

[This is a guest post by Thomas Batchelor]

I was recently looking at a tourist bus around the Matsu Islands of Taiwan, and they have a timetable online with the route and locations for picking up passengers, as below.

[VHM:  Don't trouble yourself by trying to read the fine print of the schedule itself.  Just pay attention to the note about the pickup location at the bottom of the schedule, which is enlarged below the fold.]

Today's SMBC:

I dislike calling non-Standard Mandarin Sinitic language expressions "slang" (almost as much as I am dismayed when people call Sinitic topolects dialects — we've been through that countless times).  Others may differ, but in my idiolect, "slang" is pejorative, and I distinguish "slang" from "argot; jargon; lingo; etc.", which — for me — denote particularization of occupation, not crudeness or cursing, although they may sometimes be associated with lower social levels.

slang

1756, meaning "special vocabulary of tramps or thieves", origin unknown. Possibly derived from a North Germanic source, related to Norwegian Nynorsk slengenamn (“nickname”), slengja kjeften (“to abuse verbally”, literally “to sling one's jaw”), related to Icelandic slengja (“to sling, throw, hurl”), Old Norse slyngva (“to sling”). Not believed to be connected with language or lingo.

(Wiktionary)

The screenshot I show everyone who tells me they're using AI for anything

[image or embed]

— Chris PG | PapaGlitch (@papaglitch.bsky.social) Aug 26, 2024 at 5:20 AM

Today's xkcd — "The Three Kinds of Scientific Research":

Mouseover title: "The secret fourth kind is 'we applied a standard theory to their map of every tree and got some suspicious results.'"