The net effect today is that AI English has been trained on English that is much more narrow than actual, collective human English in practice. Humans, by contrast, don’t just u ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... A friend who teaches middle school English starts the school year with a lesson on how to e-mail properly. You’d think kids born in the same year as Facebook ...

There’s a fair chance that at some point you’ve been told that you’re using hopefully wrong: Purists insist that it can only mean “in a hopeful manner” and not “it is to be hoped that.” But who are ...

If you’re a writer or editor you likely already regard Garner’s Modern English Usage as an indispensable guide. First published in 1998, the work (famously celebrated by David Foster Wallace) covers ...

Wicked. Evil. Foul. Bad. Those words mean essentially the same thing, but we don't talk about "wicked weather," "foul witches" or the "forces of bad." Understanding such subtle differences in usage ...

In 1940, St. Clair McKelway typed a memo to William Shawn, The New Yorker’s managing editor for fact. McKelway was writing a six-part Profile of Walter Winchell for the magazine, and he was unhappy ...

As far back as 2016, work on AI-based chatbots revealed that they have a disturbing tendency to reflect some of the worst biases of the society that trained them. But as large language models have ...