"After testing six AI models, the researchers found consistent favoritism for words coming from Latin and French over those with Germanic etymologies..."

"... even more than you would typically encounter in the English language. This bias appears rooted in the preference-learning stage, when the models are trained to align with human expectations about language. This process poses an inescapable problem: that you need real people to make sure the machine is aligned, but the human workers are ironically biased as well. As annotators click through sample texts, for example, they are probably subconsciously disposed to approve those that sound confident and incisive. This new finding could help explain why large language models like ChatGPT and Claude seem to have a distinctive writing style. Previous research has found that AI chatbots tend to overuse words like 'meticulous' and 'commendable,' creating a kind of linguistic uncanny valley that sounds similar to how you speak, but ever so slightly off. Perhaps the ghosts of Latin and French haunted these words during preference learning, leading human workers to reward more prestigious-sounding sentences. Of course, the Germanic versus Romance distinction is a simplification of a messier etymological reality. The notoriously overrepresented word 'delve' is actually Old English in origin...."

Writes Adam Aleksic, author of "Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language," in "Do these words make you sound smarter? The bias is spreading. English speakers love the Romance vocabulary. AI noticed" (WaPo).

The "Germanic versus Romance distinction" = "We’ll use more Latin terms when we want to speak formally or authoritatively; we’ll use Germanic words to sound crass or casual." That's how Aleksic puts it.

That made me think about what Jorge Luis Borges said about English: English is a "far finer language than Spanish," and one reason is that "English is both a Germanic and Latin language."

"For any idea, you have 2 words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example, if I say 'regal,' that is not exactly the same thing as saying 'kingly.' Or if I say 'fraternal,' that's not the same thing as saying 'brotherly.' Or 'dark' and 'obscure' — those words are different. It will make all the difference speaking, for example, of a Holy Spirit. It will make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or the Holy Ghost, since 'ghost' is a fine dark Saxon word, while 'spirit' is light —it's the Latin word...."

"Who else has written anything like his 1999 novel War and War, in which a suicidal man determines to travel to New York and type out an ancient manuscript on the internet..."

"... before taking his own life? He is the sort of writer who attracts what Jorge Luis Borges, writing about James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, called 'terror-stricken praise.' So does his Nobel prize mean the committee is simply turning back in on itself, after a run of more approachable writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Annie Ernaux?... "

Writes John Self, in "Who is Laszlo Krasznahorkai, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature? Everything you need to know about this year’s winner and his apocalyptically gloomy novels" (London Times).

"His best-known novel is his debut, Satantango (1985), about a 'devil' figure who arrives in an apocalyptically dilapidated Hungarian village. It took me three goes to get through it but, even when I struggled, I admired the weird rhythms of its sentences... and its bolshy refusal to compromise on its bleak vision. If you can’t stomach the book, you could always try the film adaptation, although at almost seven and a half hours it is not much less gruelling...."

"Satantango"... I thought it said Santiago. But no, it's in Hungary. Satan Tango. 

"If I'm going to rebrand myself, it would be maybe 'America's shaman' because the QAnon label has been stigmatized with the number of sub-labels or subcategories..."

"... conspiracy theories, white supremacists, terrorists.... I don't want to be associated with anything that the media has already maligned."

Said Jacob Chansley, quoted in "QAnon Shaman Rejects Conspiracy Theory That Helped Make Him Famous" (Newsweek).

A shaman is someone who — to quote Wikipedia — "interact[s] with the spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance."

Chansley is apparently interacting with the media to receive his messages and inspiration. The media are not the spirit world. Alignment with whatever the media tell you — dissociating yourself from everything the media have maligned — is not a special state of consciousness. I wish it were. 

ADDED: The OED entry for "shaman" led me to a 1979 piece in the London Review of Books, "'Darkness Visible' is William Golding’s first novel for twelve years/John Bayley thinks it is his best, and thinks of him as a magician":

Borges​ has written (and it is certainly true of Borges) that the writer is like a member of a primitive tribe who suddenly starts making unfamiliar noises and waving his arms about in strange new rituals.

"As a theme, fatigue is so extensive, and so intrinsic to the fact of being alive, that demarcating where it begins or ends is no simple task."

"One can imagine a Borgesian fable in which a fatiguologist, bent upon covering every aspect of the topic, dies of sheer inanition with the project incomplete. The more encyclopedic the mission, the stricter the boundaries that need to be set; if you’re expecting 'A History of Fatigue' to begin with the Iliad—whose protagonists are pre-wiped, having battled for nine years before the action of the poem gets under way—you are doomed to disappointment. Nothing about the ancient world, it would seem, appeals to Vigarello. He doubtless believes that everyone back then was brimming with juice and zip, and that if Achilles harried Hector three times around the walls of Troy it’s because both guys needed the exercise."

Writes Anthony Lane, "The Exhausting History of Fatigue Having too much to do can be tiring; having nothing to do may be worse" (The New Yorker). Lane does not like the book, "A History of Fatigue" by Georges Vigarello, but I enjoyed the review, and fatigue is an interesting subject.

And I learned a word... or, at least, "inanition" seems like a new word to me. It is — according to the OED — "The action or process of emptying; the condition of being empty; spec. the exhausted condition resulting from want or insufficiency of nourishment."

I checked the 19-year history of this blog, and "inanition" did appear once. It was in a quote from... you could almost guess and have a good shot at getting it right...

"In dreams (Coleridge writes), images take the shape of the effects we believe they cause."

"We are not terrified because some sphinx is threatening us but rather dream of a sphinx in order to explain the terror we are feeling. If this is the case, how can a simple account of such imaginings communicate the dread and the thrills, the adventure, anxieties, and joys conjured by last night's dream? I am going to attempt to do this all the same.... It took place in the Humanities Building, at dusk.... We were electing people to committees... Suddenly we were assaulted by the racket of a street band or a demonstration.... A voice cried: 'Here they come!' then: 'It's the Gods!'..."

Wrote Jorge Luis Borges, in "Ragnarok."

I'm reading that this morning because it's in an Ask Metafilter discussion about something that happened to me last night: dreaming that you are very sleepy, struggling with sleepiness within the story that is the dream.

I'm blogging it because I find it very cool when a subject recurs within a blogging session, and I had already blogged about Coleridge this morning.