Silhouettes of sharks underwater in ocean against bright light.
Silhouettes of sharks underwater in ocean against bright light. 3D rendered illustration.
It’s July, the time of year reserved for that most American of summer holidays — Discovery Channel presents Shark Week hosted by John Cena. As families across the country gather to witness what I can only assume is some sort of tussle between wrestler and fish, they may unwittingly find themselves in a dangerous grammar-related predicament.
Imagine John Cena is about to tombstone a hammerhead when you hear your father, Mr. Lee, call from the kitchen, “Could you please let everyone, especially your grandmother, know dinner is ready?” You quickly get to work crafting an email. You come up with two options. Either: It’s dinner time! Let’s eat Gramma. or, it’s dinner time! Let’s eat, Gramma. Your AI grammar assistant knows the obvious choice. The second option contains a grammatical error! ‘Its’ is underlined in red to warn you. The tool suggests you choose the first option.
But you decline. You are well aware that while most early Indo-European languages utilized a vocative case to address a particular person, modern English relies on vocative commas to set off proper nouns from the rest of the sentence. Your expertly tuned eye has spotted a grave mistake that would have made your grandmother unlikely to join you for dinner.
You choose the second option (after fixing the ‘its’) and hit send. And as everyone sits smiling at their usual place, your mood is only dampened by the fact that your AI assistant has taken a somewhat worryingly neutral stance on cannibalism. But that’s a problem for another Shark Week.
Other common errors some artificial intelligence tools can miss: Gramma made coffee for Spock, Darth, and I. (Correct: Gramma made coffee for Spock, Darth, and me. I = subject, me = object) Grammas in bowling alleys roll more strikes than in other alleys. (Correct: Grammas roll more strikes in bowling alleys than in other alleys. Parallelism.) That gang of grammas manage a UPS Store. (Correct: That gang of grammas manages a UPS Store. The subject is ‘gang’.)
Jonathan Hall is the Youth Programs Director with the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning. The Carnegie Center, 251 W. Second St., is a nonprofit educational center offering seasonal writing, publishing, and language classes, among other community programming. For more information, visit CarnegieCenterLex.org.