British broadcaster, comedian, and logophile Stephen Fry offers a helpful if tongue-in-cheek suggestion in his newsletter The Fry Corner: Let’s all write AI, the shortened form of artificial intelligence, as Ai. Fry reasons that the upper-case I is too easily confused with L. “How,” he asks, “does the great Pacino feel when he reads that Al is a threat to humanity?” This is part of a complete episode.
The so-called “lifestyle influencer accent” you hear in videos on TikTok and YouTube, where someone speaks with rising tones at the end of sentences and phrases, suggesting that they’re about to say something important, is a form of what linguists...
Meg in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, gets why the state highway department encourages drivers to use their blinkers when changing lanes, but placing a digital sign at the Sagamore Bridge that reads Use Ya Blinkah is, well, a lexical bridge too far. Meg’s...
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