Deep Thought: The Railway Car of Babel
Created | Updated Last Week
Deep Thought: The Railway Car of Babel
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How can you tell that this is AI-generated? |
Today on Twitter: A Besserwisser (First Class) has announced grandly that anytime he sees the word 'delve' in a text, he 'knows' that said text was written by ChatGPT. A horde of humans who claim to regularly use the word 'delve' in casual conversation have descended upon him in high dudgeon. He will not escape unscathed.
Many have accused him in passing of prejudice against non-native English users, and with reason. Non-native users of a language tend to learn their language from books. Their vocabulary choices may not be the standard set in daily conversation in Erie or Pontefract.
This reminded me of my fellow chemistry student back in the early 70s. She was of Indian heritage and a native of Kenya. I asked her if she didn't find the fall weather in Pittsburgh a bit nippy at night.
'A little,' she replied. 'But my apartment has a fireplace. We kindled a conflagration last night.' My involuntary laughter startled her. We delved into issues of semantics together all the way down Cardiac Hill1.
If that guy is counting on vocabulary to tell the difference between AI and human, we've got a Voight-Kampff Test kit to sell him. Meanwhile, some UK Twitter users are up to their usual tricks of trying to play language police. The subject was trains, always a fruitful topic with the passionate.
Trains and Railways and Railroad Xings
Terry Tyler (who advertises as loving 'history, books, countryside, churches, seaside, #TWD, South Park, post-apocalyptic & dystopian fiction') started it off: 'I'm old enough to remember when 'train stations' were called 'railway stations'.'
The picture on the account was that of a youngish woman with long, blonde hair. Caveat lector, I suspect. 'I'm old enough to. . . ' usually signals a statement best translated as, 'Change is bad and should be avoided at all costs.'
Father Kevin ('ruralist and birder') replied, '"The Train Children" wouldn't be the same at all. (Imagine "Daddy, my Daddy" on a 'train' station. . . No!)'
This, of course, is an invitation to the kind of conversation I have often observed when some British people get together. To anyone else, it seems to be saying, 'If you know you know: if you don't, go away and let the grownups talk.' Yes, I've heard of that children's book. I don't want to talk about it, either. Why its existence proves that nobody should call a railway station a train station, I don't know.
Julia Proofreader retweeted the 'I'm old enough to. . . ' statement and pronounced definitely, 'They still are in my world, and I don't allow the phrase 'train station' in any book I'm correcting that's written in UK English.'
Fair enough, nobody minds that. Labelling standards, and all that. We do that in the Edited Guide – try to stay in our own lane. The h2g2 Post, of course, is subject to the whims of a highly erratic Post Editor.
Graham Guest (Europhile, flaneur, and obviously a voice of sanity) put in, 'The OED cites British usage of 'train station' from the mid nineteenth century.'
I'm hoping at this point that somebody remembers when trains. . . er, railways. . . were invented. One of the first things I look for in etymologies among countries which use varieties of a common language is the history of a lexical item. In fact, linguists have used lexical items to determine things like interaction among ethnic groups during periods of ancient migration. See the way the Russian word for bread, chleb, is related to the German word for loaf, Laib. But I digress. Let us follow the original railway of thought.
Julia responded, 'Aha, yes, so many times people think of something as an Americanism, but it's actually something that we think of as archaic English that the Americans have stuck with and we've left behind.'
Okay: that's close to what I said, although expressed in a way that makes it clear that the British way of doing things is naturally the preferred one. Yes, children: quite often, North American English retains older British Isles forms. Colonisation can do this. Think of it as continental drift. In this case, of course, Pangeia had already divided before railw-, railr-, er, choo-choos came along. You can look it up: I'm not a trainspotter.
Michael Lockely on Pen-y-ghent (astronomer) mused, 'If it's in American English it should be Railroad station, as it is in many movies from the 50s and 60s.'
Well-observed, that. I, too, watch films with one ear to the ground for language variation. That's why I recently enjoyed the Netflix film Freaks: Du bist eine von uns. Which is when I noticed that modern Germans bump into each other and say 'Sorry', something I was taught never to do. And when I discovered to my unending horror that younger folk used the F-bomb as an undeclinable adjective in everyday (but agitated) speech. Nein, nein, nein! I wailed. Make them decline it! I want them to have to say Nur wegen der effingen Zugverspätung verpasse ich das Konzert! and similar.
Back to the boxcar discussion. I noted, 'US editor here: railroad station (abbrev RR) or train station is fine in the US. If I see railway, I tend to think the writer is UK - but then there's Brewer & Shipley, homeboys both, who penned that immortal line: 'Sittin' downtown in a railway station, one toke over the line.''
In other words: there are lots of ways to talk. Around here, we don't judge. As long as we can figure it out, everybody's fine. Exchanging words and phrases is like swapping recipes: it makes things richer. And the 'delve' guy? He needs to work on his vocabulary.
