grammar

When the Robots Rise Up, what Language will they Speak?

Niall O'Donnell 13 Comments

You may have read a story about Facebook shutting down an artificial intelligence because it got too intelligent. I first came across this on my Facebook newsfeed last week, and was suspicious of it: surely if this news is as big as it seems, I’d have already heard about it. So I ignored it, dismissing it as clickbait, until I saw the same story presented in a more reasonable manner on a respectable website. So I read the article, which told a more plausible story. Apparently, Facebook had develop chatbots to negotiate over virtual items. They’d been programmed with the ability to experiment with language in order to see if this could help them to dominate the discussions.

Seemingly, one morning the researchers checked on what the chatbots were up to, only to find them chatting in apparently incomprehensibly gibberish such as:

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Just How Bad is Donald Trump’s English? (Putting him to the Test)

Niall O'Donnell 34 Comments

 

It’s easy to say that Donald Trump has poor English. It’s easy to say that the level of English that he uses, in terms accuracy and tone, is far below the minimum expected of any public speaker. And of course the reason it’s so easy to say these things is that Donald Trump actually has really bad English. So inspired by a colleague’s idea, I’m going to test him, to see exactly what level of English he has. Specifically, I’m going to assess Trump’s spoken English using the assessment criteria of the spoken section of the IELTS exam.

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Coat of Arms (Featuring Neither a Coat nor Arms)

Niall O'Donnell 7 Comments

Today, you can get an idea of how my “creative” process works. On Saturday morning I was going for a run around the university here, NUI Galway. In order to ensure I met my modest distance target, I went down a little-used path, behind the old quadrangle.

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The Write Stuff

Niall O'Donnell 13 Comments

If you don’t know what to write, they say, just write. Don’t worry about what to write, just keep going. Of course, this isn’t really necessary when you’re writing for a blog. I could just not post anything. I’ve no problem taking a day off now and then. Only, at the moment, I’ve got a bit of an itch to write something. So I’m just going to write for a little bit and see where it takes me.

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“Grab them by the…”

Niall O'Donnell 19 Comments

…hand? Or, whatever you want really, but again, like yesterday, you can imagine that I’m thinking of something else. Because yesterday I got a good firm grasp of how we use synonyms for penises as insults, now I want to do the same thing from a female perspective. Well, not really from a female perspective I suppose.

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Don’t be such a…

Niall O'Donnell 17 Comments

You can imagine any word you like to finish that sentence. Personally, I’m thinking of a few different words. Words that all have two things in common: they can be used to insult a man, and refer to the male sexual organ (so be forewarned: if you’re sensitive to bad language, I’ll be swinging a lot of it round willy-nilly in the next few paragraphs).

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Addictive or Addicting?

Niall O'Donnell 13 Comments

So Twitter has been trying to entice me recently, with fake profiles following me which look semi-legit, until I follow them back and they send me messages about these online games. And doubtless the links just lead to horrible viruses (I’m still trying to figure out Twitter’s angle by the way. It usually takes me a few months to figure out each social medium, and how to use it properly. I’m not there with Twitter yet).

Anyway, what intrigued me most about these dodgy ads was their use of the word addicting. This is normally the point where I get quite reasonable and say something like, Well, you might think it’s correct to say addictive, and that addicting is wrong, but actually it’s ok to use both.

To be honest though, I hate addicting. Both my heart and my brain tell me that it’s wrong, and that addictive is right, and that’s it. Addicting looks stupid, it sounds stupid, and it doesn’t seem to make much sense, linguistically. That being said, people do say addicting, so I’m at least going to investigate why they might do that.

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