I met god. She is Black

This is a “Penguin rover” used to study Emperor penguins in Antarctica.

It’s equipped with a spy cam to assist in studying these shy animals. Researchers found that approaching these emperor penguins normally would result in their heart rates rising, producing unreliable data.

This rover works very well, enough to even entice communication from the penguins. According to researchers the penguins were “very disappointed” when the rover didn’t respond, prompting the researchers to plan to have the rover playing penguin songs on it’s next trip.

now, instead of maintaining a comprehensive, nuanced, and human-maintained encyclopedia by which to check your document, they have switched to an AI that just compares what you’ve written to what other people write in, say, Google Docs, and use the most commonly used iteration.

ever have it change something like “all intents and purposes” to “all intensive purposes” or “should’ve” to “should of”? that’s why!

(note that lots of the diversity of english comes from its role, past and present, as an imperial and colonial language. That colonial project continues VIA THINGS LIKE MODERN GRAMMAR CHECKERS. The first english grammar for schoolchildren was developed for use in India, not in England. The concept of teaching english grammar is coterminous with the rise of the british empire and is part of the project of british empire.

Moreover, oppressed populations and non-native speakers have added diversity of expression and new dialects to english as a result of horrific colonial violence. pretty shitty to force people to speak a language and then tell them their way of doing it is wrong.)

We need to work to accept all englishes and all usages, and to reduce the shame people feel around grammar (which is also race/class/gender/sexuality/ethnicity/geographic region/etc. based! that shame is just oppression). Rather than trying to get everyone to write the same way, I suggest participating in the joy of grammatical diversity. All language has rules (all versions of english have rules), but the rules are descriptive (here's how we typically generate a sentence in my dialect) not prescriptive (here's how you ought to generate a sentence in english). There's no such thing as "proper" or "correct" grammar. There are just accepted conventions in different contexts.

If you wanna learn about those conventions, fabulous: that's called studying grammar. That knowledge will make you a better writer, because you'll understand the wide world of options that grammar gives you in writing, and you'll be able to express yourself with greater precision and confidence. But you don't gotta write any particular way.

genAI fucking blows for many, many reasons, including that it doesn't fucking do the things people think it can do with language, but one specific way in which it blows is that it moves us away from the delightful diversity of language and towards homogenized boring oppressor-speak.

If people can understand you, your grammar is fine. If they can't, they should ask you what you mean (in a non-asshole way). If you're writing for publication, you gotta learn the conventions for that kind of publication (and sometimes fight them). That's it.

Whatever your grammar pet peeve is . . . work on letting it go. It doesn't matter.