In early January, I was transcribing a supplementary document for court proceedings. It was a simply awful time for someone who was an English grammar teacher in a past life. (I nearly got a English literature scholarship for my first university degree, too.) The documents were so badly written that it gave me profound thoughts about the death of my language (which we will get to!).
There were hundreds of pages of this stuff, which was mostly variations on the first ten pages or so, but it wasn’t exactly repetitive. (At least that would have been quick and easy to transcribe!) Every page was full of mistakes, but different mistakes. It was all written by the same person – as far as I can tell – who simply didn’t know how to use spelling, capitalisation, or indentation. That much I could excuse, except this person didn’t even make consistent mistakes; almost like they didn’t know, so were just hedging their bets. Their spelling was puzzling, and even their sentence structure didn’t always make sense. After transcribing only dozens of the hundreds of pages of this documentation in Microsoft spell checker was highlighting Melbourne and subtotal as mistakes. This writing was so bad that it caused the machine to second guess itself! I even started wondering: How could someone learn how to use a language in a way that made them actively more difficult to understand?
Of all things, I started thinking about the latest series of advertisements I’d been getting on YouTube. These were obviously written and voiced entirely by artificial intelligence, then recommended to me by another artificial intelligence, in a way that insulted my organic intelligence. None of the artificial intelligence involved had the capability of detecting any mistakes. (Pro. tip: try saying “this $AU200 machine” relative to anything. It’s just weird and wrong, isn’t it?)
Even as a child I observed how television programming was becoming more automated with less human involvement who for example would decide to begin a advertising break midway through a sentence? To cut off a joke before the punchline? Now though the artificial intelligence writes and voices the advertisements as well as recommending them to me, after engineering the greatest certainty that my attention wouldn't go anywhere else.
I had a horrible flash-forward to a future in which even such creative and intuitive tasks would be performed entirely by artificial intelligence. They of course would be designed and administered by unaccountable mathematicians and engineers. They in turn are not likely to deeply understand grammatical intricacy or poetic appeal. Even language tools designed by engineers prove this: digital spelling-checkers & online translators are a imperfect substitute for a professional proof-reader. Nevertheless, people seem more willing to pay for tools like Grammarly than a human proof-reader (at least according to advertisements served to me, a former grammar teacher).
We are familiar with the expression that “those who don’t learn [from] history are doomed to repeat it” (Santayana, 1905). I recently heard a variation of this, that “those who learn history are doomed to watch helplessly while others repeat it”. I foresaw another version of this, in which people who passionately care about language – or English, at least – would be doomed to watch helplessly while it is abused by bureaucracies who are insufficiently self-aware to realise the problem, let alone their contribution to it.
From my perspective, the trouble began before my time (just). The 1980s push for economic rationalism valued maths over languages and technical skills over contextual thinking. I distinctly remember being told in school that there was no need to study anything except for business, law, and accounting degrees, in that order, because “every way you want to work is a business and everyone you want to do business with speaks English”. Retrospectively this proved my point about awareness, because the advice was given to us by P.E. Teacher. As a society we invest butt-tonnes of money into professional and community sport. The dividends are a society which is less healthy than 50 years ago, similarly successful in international competitions, but spends more per head on gambling than anyone else (including other cultures that are stereotypically famous for it). My lifetime had already seen the Japanese boom and the $5 orange, with its legacy still visible in parts of this country. Within a few short years of us young ones receiving this advice came the China boom. The major skills in demand were mining and civil engineering, but we already had people who could do that, as well as sports science. Now we needed Mandarin fluency and cultural skill. Whoops!
We muddled through that of course; Australia continues to be the lucky country. China is the major trading partner for ourselves and pretty much everyone else. Now there is still a shortage of people who “understand” China, and people who can write well. People can't write well? how can that be we all learned that at school! So did the people who wrote the submission, who somehow don't understand capitalization, punctuation, or spelling.
You might have heard employers today complaining that there are too many people in the job market who “don’t know how to write”. Perhaps this is also linked to a resurgent discourse of “soft skills” in hiring practice? Never mind that the project managers & lawyers would have all been encouraged to study “hard” sciences, math’s & technology, over languages, or creative/performing arts. Those on the other side will be consigned to jobs in data entry, systems maintenance & administration, hospitality, childcare, aged care, teaching, social work, or manual trades, without any hint of irony. (That is, until machines completely replace manual trades as well.) Irony at least can be unintentional as it doesn’t require reflective capacity, after all. According to recruitment theory, formal education is only 10% of what somebody knows. Education theory also says that one can reliably retain 10% of lesson input, if one was even paying attention. What these jobs tend to have in common is low pay, low social status, and insecure conditions. The rich will get even richer, and the poor will remain poor.
None of my concerns are at all new. The book ‘Eats shoots and leaves’ (Truss, 2003) is based on a pun which most native anglophones wouldn't immediately understand, since the pun is inherently grammatical. The book makes analogy to a parrot in danger who could only scream out phrases and words which it's overheard (from memory, “I’ve lost my other sock!”). The parrot doesn't understand that those words don't fit its current context and that a different expression fits its context perfectly (e.g., “help! Fire!” or “call an ambulance!”). Even context is something which is beyond its bird-brain, and so it dies helplessly. I may not have even learned about in school except for a particular choice of subjects and teachers.
Even George Orwell took inspiration by science-fiction dystopia in which human government was completely surrendered to artificial intelligence. Accordingly, the population were taught facts like 2 + 2 = 4 without ever learning the meaning of ‘plus’. Presumably, no one had thought that was important enough to program into the A.I. Orwell 's crowning glory (1984) imagined a world in which all literature, cinema, and other performing arts was procedurally generated by machines operating by people with the requisite technical skill but who didn't actually care about the content they generate. Meanwhile, the P.O.V. protagonist Winston still reads book recreationally. He values his books so highly that he tries to keep them secret from the deep state. He is also an employee of the same state whose primary duties appear to be maintaining the retroactive continuity of the authorised truth and history. While comparing what we don't like about the world to 1984 is very cliché, – see also ‘the Handmaid's tale’ – I’d like to consider how to prevent this from being irreversibly entrenched.
I'm a great admirer of continental Europe. I appreciate learning in school – since I defied that P.E. Teacher's advice and continued studying languages, in which I got good marks – that the German we learned at school was codified and authorised by the German government. This took a rigorous and extensive scientific process including qualified professionals and academics and politicians who took their tasks very seriously. The French government likewise regulates vocabulary and grammar of their language. Perhaps there is another purest in their society who bemoans the encouragement of “le weekend”?
This role I see being taken up by the Commonwealth of Nations – who presently also seems to care more about sport than other forms of “cultural ties” – or the British Council. With input from truly worldwide expertise and understanding, there should be authoritative standards separate from the influence of celebrity micro-blogging, deliberate misspelling as corporate trademarks, programming syntax, and other sources which society values more than its own science and historical evolution. That standard could helpfully replace the absurdity of Microsoft and apple spell checkers looking at Australian, Bermudan, Canadian, Irish, New Zealand, Zimbabwean and British English as separate languages, then also defaulting to American English, apparently at a whim.
Our language is dying. The forces involved globally significant and they require a globalised response. I certainly can’t save it on my own. The King’s English needs our help. (If King Charles happens to get a copy of this, I’m available to discuss how to reverse this trend.)
