todayinliterature - The Monday Morning Memo

This post from the April 19 edition of my friend Steve King’s blog, Today in Literature, reveals Steve’s witty, snarky side:

“On this date in 1928, the final volume of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. Work on the OED began in 1879, with an original estimate that the complete four-volume set would take ten years. When it took five years to get to “ant,” the editors knew they had underestimated spectacularly — perhaps definitively, given that the OED has been in a state of perpetual addition and revision. Recent Supplements inform us, for example, that an “aliterate” is a person able to read but unwilling to do so, and that “teledildonics” is computer sex — though the mandate of the OED does not extend to suggesting a connection between the two.”

“The difference between writing and editing is like the difference between writing and reading.

Reading is enormously important. Obviously, it closes the gaps of our ignorance and expands our knowledge, but it does so through the language of others; their words, their sentences, their narratives and arguments.

Editing, too, begins with the language of someone else in the case of ChatGPT, something else. Of course, to some extent, writing is editing, too. We inherit our language and its rules from culture from the past. We express ourselves through a system that we didn’t invent, but that system is so infinitely flexible that we can use it to create structures of our own.

Language is how human beings understand themselves and the world. But writing is how we understand uniquely. Not to write is to live according to the language of others. Or worse, to live through edits, tweaks, and embellishments to language generated by an overconfident AI chatbot.”

- Evan Puschak, The Nerdwriter

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