Weed management and other crucial issues

 

Apparently, I’m worried about weed management solutions, controlling sucking pests, glypholate (whatever this may be), government advertising on fossil fuels, the need to “kick fossil fuels out of my super”, climate change and domestic violence; oh, and I speak Spanish. My Kindle is infested with bizarre ads each time I refresh my Solitaire screen. And because I like to play Solitaire with my morning several cups of tea, the machine also thinks I like to gamble and advertises gambling sites in a strip at the top of the screen.

Saving the world is hard, one ad tells me. Well, I know that, thank you very much. We Jews are brought up on the notion of Tikkun Olam, the need to save/repair the world. Sorry it’s taken you multiple thousands of years to catch up.

All of which almost adds up to “Yaa Boo Sucks” for Artificial Intelligence.

Except for one other thing which is decidedly creepy. When I’m typing an email, the computer knows what I want to say and finishes my phrases or sentences for me. It also supposes that it’s better at grammar and punctuation than I am, a conclusion I would seriously debate. Mind you, considering the appalling level of grammar and punctuation one comes across in almost everything one reads, perhaps this computer aptitude is A Good Thing. Have you ever reflected how hard some people find it to know when and where to put the apostrophe in “it’s”! I would have thought this to be blindingly obvious but I’m wrong again.

I sometimes reflect on the fact that thanks initially to computers, this is the first generation in human history when children know more than adults. During the interminable weeks of “Grandma School” with the seven-year-old, the hours were punctuated by calls to the 12-year-old to navigate round some part of the computer and fix my various problems. The teachers, most of whom are much younger than my own children, all seem perfectly attuned to prepare lessons for on-line learning and talented at making the work colourful and appealing as well as necessary. Obviously teacher training has a large visual/computer component if occasionally deficient in broader knowledge. For example, they were teaching the children about onomatopoeia. I would have thought this word rather too adult but what do I know! Well, actually, I do know that you can’t ask children in a writing exercise to include “AN” onomatopoeia. Grrrrr!

I know I’ve lost the battle to keep media and data correctly plural. Media and data are – not is – but who cares these days. I also haven’t won the “using verbs as nouns” issue but I continue to tread my lonely path refusing to diarise. I won’t ever use the phrase “going forward” or tell you how some action has “impacted” the situation; what’s wrong with “had an impact on …”? I also loathe the radio journalists’ use of the un-verb “commentate”; it’s comment, dear. And there’s my other bugbear; collective nouns are supposed to take singular verbs. So the government is, not are; so is the local football team, the Council and multitudes of other examples.

I have recently come across some examples of modern language gone mad. These were genuinely used during a meeting very recently. The participants were urged to use a “pure bottom up cell backed view” and – this is priceless – “list and drop and then aggregate with some quantitative overlay”.

As Shakespeare said: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

However, I’m not entirely sure that any of these grammatical and punctuation issues are worth a row of beans. I suspect that I’m the one who’s wrong, not because any of the grammatical causes which I espouse are incorrect but just because it probably doesn’t matter any more and I’m just left out in the grammatical wilderness.

 

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Samuel Goldwyn, renown for his mangling of the English language

“An oral contract is not worth the paper it’s written on.”

“They’re always biting the hand that lays the golden egg.”