On the positive side of this, research papers by competent people read very clearly with readable sentences, while those who are afraid that their content doesn't quite cut it, litter it with jargon, long complicated sentences, hoping that by making things hard, they will look smart.
But to expand on the spelling topic, good spelling and grammar is now free with AI tools. It no longer signals being educated. Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human and the imperfections increase my trust in the effort spent on the thing.
> Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human
Except that this signal is now being abused. People add into the prompts requesting a few typos. And requesting an informal style.
There was a guy complaining about AI generated comments on substack, where the guy had noticed the pattern of spelling mistakes in the AI responses. It is common enough now.
But yes, typos do match the writer - you can still notice certain mistakes that a human might make that an AI wouldn't generate. Humans are good at catching certain errors but not others, so there is a large bias in the mistakes they miss. And keyboard typos are different from touch autoincorrection. AI generated typos have their own flavour.
>Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human and the imperfections increase my trust in the effort spent on the thing.
Isn’t this a bit short sighted? So if someone has a wide vocabulary and uses proper grammar, you mistrust them by default?
Not necessarily but it carries less weight than pre-LLMS. Obviously it's just a heuristic and not the whole story and telltale AI signs are not purely about good spelling and grammar. But I just appreciate some natural, human texture in my correspondence these days.
If this becomes the prevailing inclination amongst most readers, Janan Ganesh (one of my most favorite commentators anywhere) at the Financial Times will have a dim professional future.
- No signalling: I dress more formally than everyone else because that's been my style since forever and I'm not going to change for a role that doesn't require it.
> I wear ratty old clothes with holes in them, and nobody will dare to question it because I'm the important one here
I live in a wealthy town. It’s less sinister than explicit counter signaling. More that I’ll wear comfortable clothes until they wear out because I have better things to do with my time than shop, and I don’t need to use dress anymore to get the access I want and need.
Not having to care is often part of the countersignaling. An honest signal doesn't always take effort. In fact it's the tryhard imitators that have to expend effort emulating this. The real deal is effortless and comes naturally.
The silverback gorilla can come across as scary and formidable even when its just lazing around not trying to look intimidating. It's just big, without spending thought cycles on having to appear big, but the others still recognize it.
> Not having to care is often part of the countersignaling
If it’s used to signal, yes. The absence of a signal can be a signal. Or it can blend into the background. My point is wealthy folks wearing ordinary, loved clothes can be either, and in many cases it’s honestly just not giving a fuck and blending in with everyone else by happenstance.
There is the "I don't (have to) give a fuck" counter-signaling. But also what about people that really don't care too much, out of ignorance even, or just fatigue.
Sure there is intentionality in there, but do we really call that _counter-signaling_?
They can try it and sometimes it works, but generally it's hard to imitate well. You have to not give a fuck about the right things. The imitators who just don't give a fuck about anything will stumble on something genuinely important.
Like the cool guy at school who doesn't give a fuck about what the teachers say will have to give a fuck about his friends and the community around him, to the skills that he gets his coolness from to preserve his status.
A boss who sends informal messages should still give a fuck about the overall state of the team, on being timely to respond to actually important matters even if just giving a quick ok sent from my iPhone.
The countersignaling is more about "I care about/provide more important things that are more valuable or impactful for you than getting caught up in bullshit insignificant superficial matters"
Well I agree and support that! Everyone cares about something. That's good and healthy.
There is a ton of value in intentionality. I realize I'm defending against this idea that if you don't do a given thing it must mean you really, really care about signaling that you'd never be caught doing that thing. You want to be caught signaling that you aren't doing it!
Of course that's true for some, many even. It's also true that someone just thought and lived and experienced and through intentionality, they come to opt-out of more and more of the fuss, in either direction.
Yes, overthinking this is also possible. I've had bosses who type correctly capitalized, with punctuation and paragraphs, and it's simply their style, not much else to read into it. But sometimes it can indicate a certain pedantic busybody personality who misses the forest for the trees and can be a pain in the ass to interact with.
Agree, the parent comment leaves no room for nuance so people end up damned if they do and damned if they don't.
I do think thinking through the extremes and motivations and intentions of behavior is worth it. But confident conclusions less so.
When it comes to writing and fashion, definitely people over-correct to project a status, in both directions. But also there's just the aged realization that people will think what they will think, and you kinda just opt-out of the game.
You can't really opt out, just choose better suited minigames.
Generally when you don't (have to) care, you either have to back that up with some other accumulated reputation/value, or sacrifice some things. Like you can opt out of the job market game and being bossed around either by founding your own company, going self employed with clients (the hard part), or just sacrifice and downsize your life standard, become homeless or similar. But someone who needs a steady income in lieu of a big inheritance can't just opt out of caring.
This isnt perfect. Our household income is probably 500k/yr and growing in a city with an average income of ~100k+.
If I wear nice stuff to the park with the kids, I'm noticed. If I wear raggy gym clothes, I'm ignored.
My best guess is that comfortable clothes are necessary but you also need something high value in addition. New shoes or expensive outerwear that 'your wife bought'.
> My best guess is that comfortable clothes are necessary but you also need something high value in addition
I’m just a regular. The point is I’m not signaling anything, I’m just not bothering with a signal because I have other things (namely, being recognized) that will e.g. ensure I get a table even if it’s a busy night.
If I go to Vegas I may grab a silk shirt because, yes, my service experience absolutely varies based on that, and I don’t want to have to wait until they see what I order or get to the check-in counter to start being paid attention to. (Which is annoying. And I prefer my t-shirts with cat holes in them. But I don’t like waiting in lines more than I dislike having to do my hair.)
(I do maybe counter signal in Palo Alto, where I refuse to wear a blazer or a Palo-Alto-grey hoodie. But that’s less of a power move than me inviting attention as a now outsider.)
I told this story about the old man in his 70s walking through a plant, giving his multi-decades expertise in how to solve our foam problems.
Everyone else wore a polo... This guy genuinely didn't care. He was making $500/hr and didn't really want to be there. He was begged. He did some weird stuff with sticky notes on $100k molds... (and he didn't solve our problem).
In my line of work we have professionals and lay people in contact with each other often, and I have found I get the best reaction (from all audiences) when I square myself away. Untidy dress isn't immediately disqualifying, but if it's enough to be noticeable it's enough to deserve an explanation.
What is sad is that these people from the start think of good grammar as an effort to "look professional" (which they can then discard), and not as an effort to be clear, an effort which fits into the basic respect one gives other people.
People are always impressed by how formal and informal tone and relative status is encoded in East Asian languages and how English doesn't have this and is supposedly egalitarian. Here's an example to show how it does exist also in English! Social relations are going to be expressed somehow. It's just how human culture works. The lower status person typically uses longer, more elaborate phrasing, while the higher status person blurts shorter ones. I wouldn't be surprised if equivalents exist in animals too.
That's what's taught in a lot of linguistics and language classes now: rules of spelling and grammar are power games designed to perpetuate one culture while repressing others, rather than tools for clarifying thought. It's fallout from the postmodern search for power dynamics in all things.
A friend recently brought up Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language" [0] and the Merriam Webster's Word Matters Podcast episode on it [1]. She had "read" without understanding the former and had listened with credulity to the latter. The podcast savages Orwell for not understanding "how language in general and English in particular actually works" and for his "absolutism" but especially for violating all of his precepts in his essay. Had either my friend or the podcasters bothered to read the essay carefully, they would have found that Orwell explains that he did so deliberately. When I asked my friend to summarize Orwell's essay and distill it to a single thesis, she replied that he was simply prescriptivist and wanted to tell people what to do. That's what the podcast got out of it too. For example, from the podcast:
> A big part of the conversations that we've all had with members of the public or strangers, people who correspond with a dictionary in one way or another, is some kind of membership of a club. "You care about language in the way that I do." There is absolutely a huge moral component that is imposed upon that. We always are judging others by their use of language. We are always judged by our use of language, by the way we spell, by the way we pronounce words. That's just a simple human fact. It's easier for us as professionals to separate that from culture.
The last sentence reminds me of a feedback loop: the "professionals" claim power based on the fact that they see the exercise of power in language rather than on how to use language for communicating clearly. This is how we get to a point where good grammar is a tool for "looking professional" rather than speaking and writing clearly.
I walked my friend back through the actual essay and asked her what Orwell wanted from each point, and she realized that it was, in fact, clarity, not power. Orwell wanted to challenge his readers to think about what they wanted to say before saying it, so that they could say what they meant rather than repeating what they heard commonly said (a note could be made here about large language models and probability).
> If I had sent out an email with even a quarter of the typos they had, I probably would've lost my job.
This probably isn’t true, though. But you didn’t want to test your luck, so you took the safe route of carefully crafting your emails. The privilege is not worrying about being fired over trivial reasons.
What I've seen is that leaders often communicate brusquely downward, but formally upward - and the higher the rank, the greater the magnitude (in each direction).
I think it's a consequence of having more and more people asking you things (on the downward side), while being responsible for decisions of more critical importance (on the upward side) as you go further up the chain of command.
That fits witj my experiences. And i want to add an otjer layer. In ai times its somtimes even nice to see some typos. You Casn be pretty sure it was not written by ai.
At one of my previous jobs some of my coworkers and I had an in-joke about how it was possible to tell which of the emails from the CEO were written directly by him or not based on whether it used the spelling "pls" for "please" because of how often he liked to use it. It hadn't occurred to me to view this phenomenon in the way that the article does, but at least in my experience it certainly seems to be accurate.
This was a, tongue in cheek, distinction between the language used by the posh and by the aspiring-posh. It's seems analogous to the OP's sense of boss vs non-boss language and diction, which I believe exists.
I think this isn't quite what "privilege" means, at least these days. People talk about "white privilege" for example, meaning that people who are white can do XYZ or avoid ABC, unlike other people.
In the example the author writes about, the privilege is not "being a bag grammar person", it's being a high-ranking person. The bad grammar is the thing that those people are able to get away with.
IMO, he's confusing the disease with the symptom, so to speak.
Separately, I would say that high-ranking people can definitely get away with short emails, and to some extent brusque emails. Bad grammar is perhaps just the next domino to topple.
I am more appalled that all those emails have that footer that says - if you’re not intended recipient you should delete immediately. Yet people see it and just copy those emails. No respect for the legal disclaimer. Now they can all be sued for ignoring that legal disclaimer, I suppose they will face justice sooner than all those people in emails.
if i sent an email to my ceo and they replied with typos and bad grammar, i wouldn't think "wow, they are flexing their privilege to be able to do that".
i would be excited that i'm being treated as a member of the inner circle and they can speak freely and casually with me.
In the country where I grew up, physicians have immense clout and are notorious for writing unintelligibly. I once pointed this out as a kid and was told by the secretary something like: the doctor is too busy to write legible prescriptions.
I'd put it the other way around: Bad Grammar is a courtesy. I run a startup that's small, but busy. I get a high frequency stream of inbound questions, notifications and asks to make decisions by my team and customers. If I don't respond or decide quickly I become a bottleneck. Likewise, if I wait, things pile up. So, rather than keep everyone waiting for me, I make a point of pulling my phone out as soon as I get a message and provide an answer straight away as much as possible. These answers are brief and to the point. And they are laden with shitty grammar. But they are almost instant and that feels better than a well formulated essay two hours later.
Having said that, I started using Gmail's "polish" feature to turn "yes" into "That sounds great, let's go ahead with it" or some such corporatism. Not sure if that's much better...
> It's almost as if, once you get to a certain level of power, you no longer need to try.
Correct. I think it's also a bit of a shibboleth now, like not wearing a suit. In former days the lower ranked employees wore jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, etc. and the bosses all wore suits and ties. Now it's the opposite at least in tech. If you see someone in "business" attire, you know they're middle management or sales and have no power, where if someone is in a tshirt and jeans they're probably a founder or executive. It's a flex to dress casual.
> Now it's the opposite at least in tech. If you see someone in "business" attire, you know they're middle management or sales and have no power, where if someone is in a tshirt and jeans they're probably a founder or executive. It's a flex to dress casual.
Eh? I've been working in tech for over 20 years. For all of that time, most people wore casual clothes.
Grammar privilege feels 90% understanding the audience and timing vs something like 10% power dynamics. As with most things where there can be a power imbalance, that does not mean those with power (e.g. managers) should not help set expectations on an even field with each of their employees anyways. Nor does it mean the other 10% of cases don't exist, just "don't ignore that 90% of this is probably one being too worried about sounding professional in every possible scenario".
Before going into the workforce, we're usually taught professionals are expected to communicate like professionals 100% of the time. It's just the safer bet to make as it's simply a lot harder (though certainly not impossible) to foul things up in a professional situation by having good grammar and well written emails than vice versa.
That said, it seems like most people I've ever actually worked with (on any level) do not like communicating 100% professionally the majority of the time (especially in small groups/directly) and may actually consider THAT disrespectful. Some from practicality ("don't waste so much time on an email we could have talked through casually in a minute" etc), some for just having different social expectations ("We've worked together for 3 years, why are you sounding like a door-to-door salesman about to make a pitch to me instead of just saying you had a thought" etc), or a laundry list of other reasons. Telling when and how much professionalism is expected is just something you have to learn to read the individual/crowd for, but it's probably a positive signal a lot less often than the author assumes it usually is.
Another dimension to this is native vs 2nd language speakers.
For those of us who had to learn English, we put a lot of effort into grammar, while native speakers whip out half-baked sentences without a second thought.
> It's almost as if, once you get to a certain level of power, you no longer need to try.
It’s relative to the power level difference between the two parties.
We’re talking about someone (your boss) who doesn’t really need to present an appearance of professionalism to their proverbial lowly underlings.
As slapdash as their response to you might appear - if you were to observe that same person composing a reply to the CEO, I'd wager that all the hallmarks of grammatical precision and professionalism would be back in spades.
This is so yawn. Do young professionals starting out have to impress their bosses? Yes. Do bosses have to impress them? Usually not. Who cares? Power dynamics exist, it’s easy to play the grammar game, so just do it and stop pretending it’s some form of oppression.
Using language "correctly" is one of humanity's oldest class dividers. [citation needed, source: me speculating] If you personally benefit from dividing people into in- and out-groups (most of the time you do), saying you must speak a certain way is a great way to get people to self-identify on one side of that line. (Excluding cases where grammar helps with communication, that's "I don't understand you" versus "you sound poor".)
You make it hard enough that someone needs years of expensive education or has to be born in the right family that speaks the right way, and now all we can do it try to meet that arbitrary standard. Everyone will struggle, so the act of calling it out is a choice, rather than a fact. If someone lets that mask slip, IMO it's because they're not worried about being accused of occupying the wrong side of the line, rather than any lack of "trying". Trying sort of implies there is a goal to hit.
Maybe someone can clarify this but I was also pretty appalled by the grammar in the Epstein emails until someone pointed out it could be an artifact of OCR or decoding issues.
Not sure why they would have to do OCR on emails. Were they printed out? On PDF for some reason? The decoding thing I kinda get but that you can easily point out because of all the equal signs.
It's funny she mentions the horrible grammar in the leaked sony emails because that's what I remember most from it too. This one always gets a laugh from me.
At first i was about to disagree, because i thought, "ah hell nah man I'm sending emojis and shit at work all day" and then i realized, i send emojis and shit to my peers all day (well, and to my dumbass boss who i don't respect).
I think about the email i sent that was to be read by the CTO and i not only ensured it was totally correct, i asked a colleague to proofread it.
I think its probably just having to respond to lots of messages from your phone in the middle of meetings is the job, and you'll quickly decide that getting the point across is the most important thing.
In the United states, at least in my business, we prize congeniality and sincerity. I think part of the trend the author discovered might be that experienced professionals unconsciously use informal language structures to avoid seeming pretentious.
Man, everything is privilege these days. You’re privileged to get full score on SAT, Steph Curry has 3 point privilege, Taylor Swift has singer privilege. I have nice warm blanket privilege and am currently experiencing President’s Day privilege. I remember when I had just started in engineering and experiencing new grad privilege and then receiving promotion privilege every year.
I’ve been thinking about going and getting grocery privilege today but I could use delivery privilege instead.
This is almost textbook countersignalling. The same as:
- Signalling: I dress more formally than everyone else to make up for the fact I'm less professional in other ways
- No signalling: I dress like everyone else because I am like everyone else
- Countersignalling: I wear ratty old clothes with holes in them, and nobody will dare to question it because I'm the important one here
On the positive side of this, research papers by competent people read very clearly with readable sentences, while those who are afraid that their content doesn't quite cut it, litter it with jargon, long complicated sentences, hoping that by making things hard, they will look smart.
But to expand on the spelling topic, good spelling and grammar is now free with AI tools. It no longer signals being educated. Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human and the imperfections increase my trust in the effort spent on the thing.
> Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human
Except that this signal is now being abused. People add into the prompts requesting a few typos. And requesting an informal style.
There was a guy complaining about AI generated comments on substack, where the guy had noticed the pattern of spelling mistakes in the AI responses. It is common enough now.
But yes, typos do match the writer - you can still notice certain mistakes that a human might make that an AI wouldn't generate. Humans are good at catching certain errors but not others, so there is a large bias in the mistakes they miss. And keyboard typos are different from touch autoincorrection. AI generated typos have their own flavour.
>Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human and the imperfections increase my trust in the effort spent on the thing.
Isn’t this a bit short sighted? So if someone has a wide vocabulary and uses proper grammar, you mistrust them by default?
Not necessarily but it carries less weight than pre-LLMS. Obviously it's just a heuristic and not the whole story and telltale AI signs are not purely about good spelling and grammar. But I just appreciate some natural, human texture in my correspondence these days.
a vocabulary of certain width raises a question "does this creature understand the words it is using?". So yeah I mistrust them more
If this becomes the prevailing inclination amongst most readers, Janan Ganesh (one of my most favorite commentators anywhere) at the Financial Times will have a dim professional future.
There's also:
- No signalling: I dress more formally than everyone else because that's been my style since forever and I'm not going to change for a role that doesn't require it.
> I wear ratty old clothes with holes in them, and nobody will dare to question it because I'm the important one here
I live in a wealthy town. It’s less sinister than explicit counter signaling. More that I’ll wear comfortable clothes until they wear out because I have better things to do with my time than shop, and I don’t need to use dress anymore to get the access I want and need.
Not having to care is often part of the countersignaling. An honest signal doesn't always take effort. In fact it's the tryhard imitators that have to expend effort emulating this. The real deal is effortless and comes naturally.
The silverback gorilla can come across as scary and formidable even when its just lazing around not trying to look intimidating. It's just big, without spending thought cycles on having to appear big, but the others still recognize it.
> Not having to care is often part of the countersignaling
If it’s used to signal, yes. The absence of a signal can be a signal. Or it can blend into the background. My point is wealthy folks wearing ordinary, loved clothes can be either, and in many cases it’s honestly just not giving a fuck and blending in with everyone else by happenstance.
There is the "I don't (have to) give a fuck" counter-signaling. But also what about people that really don't care too much, out of ignorance even, or just fatigue.
Sure there is intentionality in there, but do we really call that _counter-signaling_?
They can try it and sometimes it works, but generally it's hard to imitate well. You have to not give a fuck about the right things. The imitators who just don't give a fuck about anything will stumble on something genuinely important.
Like the cool guy at school who doesn't give a fuck about what the teachers say will have to give a fuck about his friends and the community around him, to the skills that he gets his coolness from to preserve his status.
A boss who sends informal messages should still give a fuck about the overall state of the team, on being timely to respond to actually important matters even if just giving a quick ok sent from my iPhone.
The countersignaling is more about "I care about/provide more important things that are more valuable or impactful for you than getting caught up in bullshit insignificant superficial matters"
Well I agree and support that! Everyone cares about something. That's good and healthy.
There is a ton of value in intentionality. I realize I'm defending against this idea that if you don't do a given thing it must mean you really, really care about signaling that you'd never be caught doing that thing. You want to be caught signaling that you aren't doing it!
Of course that's true for some, many even. It's also true that someone just thought and lived and experienced and through intentionality, they come to opt-out of more and more of the fuss, in either direction.
Yes, overthinking this is also possible. I've had bosses who type correctly capitalized, with punctuation and paragraphs, and it's simply their style, not much else to read into it. But sometimes it can indicate a certain pedantic busybody personality who misses the forest for the trees and can be a pain in the ass to interact with.
That’s why there are entire books based on the joke that you can’t tell a homeless guy from a hippie with a trust fund.
And of course you can, at latest after one or two sentences.
Agree, the parent comment leaves no room for nuance so people end up damned if they do and damned if they don't.
I do think thinking through the extremes and motivations and intentions of behavior is worth it. But confident conclusions less so.
When it comes to writing and fashion, definitely people over-correct to project a status, in both directions. But also there's just the aged realization that people will think what they will think, and you kinda just opt-out of the game.
You can't really opt out, just choose better suited minigames.
Generally when you don't (have to) care, you either have to back that up with some other accumulated reputation/value, or sacrifice some things. Like you can opt out of the job market game and being bossed around either by founding your own company, going self employed with clients (the hard part), or just sacrifice and downsize your life standard, become homeless or similar. But someone who needs a steady income in lieu of a big inheritance can't just opt out of caring.
This isnt perfect. Our household income is probably 500k/yr and growing in a city with an average income of ~100k+.
If I wear nice stuff to the park with the kids, I'm noticed. If I wear raggy gym clothes, I'm ignored.
My best guess is that comfortable clothes are necessary but you also need something high value in addition. New shoes or expensive outerwear that 'your wife bought'.
> My best guess is that comfortable clothes are necessary but you also need something high value in addition
I’m just a regular. The point is I’m not signaling anything, I’m just not bothering with a signal because I have other things (namely, being recognized) that will e.g. ensure I get a table even if it’s a busy night.
If I go to Vegas I may grab a silk shirt because, yes, my service experience absolutely varies based on that, and I don’t want to have to wait until they see what I order or get to the check-in counter to start being paid attention to. (Which is annoying. And I prefer my t-shirts with cat holes in them. But I don’t like waiting in lines more than I dislike having to do my hair.)
(I do maybe counter signal in Palo Alto, where I refuse to wear a blazer or a Palo-Alto-grey hoodie. But that’s less of a power move than me inviting attention as a now outsider.)
I told this story about the old man in his 70s walking through a plant, giving his multi-decades expertise in how to solve our foam problems.
Everyone else wore a polo... This guy genuinely didn't care. He was making $500/hr and didn't really want to be there. He was begged. He did some weird stuff with sticky notes on $100k molds... (and he didn't solve our problem).
But you knew this guy was an expert.
In my line of work we have professionals and lay people in contact with each other often, and I have found I get the best reaction (from all audiences) when I square myself away. Untidy dress isn't immediately disqualifying, but if it's enough to be noticeable it's enough to deserve an explanation.
What is sad is that these people from the start think of good grammar as an effort to "look professional" (which they can then discard), and not as an effort to be clear, an effort which fits into the basic respect one gives other people.
People are always impressed by how formal and informal tone and relative status is encoded in East Asian languages and how English doesn't have this and is supposedly egalitarian. Here's an example to show how it does exist also in English! Social relations are going to be expressed somehow. It's just how human culture works. The lower status person typically uses longer, more elaborate phrasing, while the higher status person blurts shorter ones. I wouldn't be surprised if equivalents exist in animals too.
This is a good point. Perhaps the poor attempt at grammar indicates a lack of empathy, which is a trait the Epstein-adjacent share.
who is "these people"
the ones writing those emails with bad grammar
That was not clear to me either. But, given that clarification, I agree!
The psychopaths who rise to the top of capitalism.[0][1]
0. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-ma... 1. https://www.newsweek.com/ceo-dark-personality-success-machia...
That's what's taught in a lot of linguistics and language classes now: rules of spelling and grammar are power games designed to perpetuate one culture while repressing others, rather than tools for clarifying thought. It's fallout from the postmodern search for power dynamics in all things.
A friend recently brought up Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language" [0] and the Merriam Webster's Word Matters Podcast episode on it [1]. She had "read" without understanding the former and had listened with credulity to the latter. The podcast savages Orwell for not understanding "how language in general and English in particular actually works" and for his "absolutism" but especially for violating all of his precepts in his essay. Had either my friend or the podcasters bothered to read the essay carefully, they would have found that Orwell explains that he did so deliberately. When I asked my friend to summarize Orwell's essay and distill it to a single thesis, she replied that he was simply prescriptivist and wanted to tell people what to do. That's what the podcast got out of it too. For example, from the podcast:
> A big part of the conversations that we've all had with members of the public or strangers, people who correspond with a dictionary in one way or another, is some kind of membership of a club. "You care about language in the way that I do." There is absolutely a huge moral component that is imposed upon that. We always are judging others by their use of language. We are always judged by our use of language, by the way we spell, by the way we pronounce words. That's just a simple human fact. It's easier for us as professionals to separate that from culture.
The last sentence reminds me of a feedback loop: the "professionals" claim power based on the fact that they see the exercise of power in language rather than on how to use language for communicating clearly. This is how we get to a point where good grammar is a tool for "looking professional" rather than speaking and writing clearly.
I walked my friend back through the actual essay and asked her what Orwell wanted from each point, and she realized that it was, in fact, clarity, not power. Orwell wanted to challenge his readers to think about what they wanted to say before saying it, so that they could say what they meant rather than repeating what they heard commonly said (a note could be made here about large language models and probability).
[0] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-matters-podcast/episode...
> If I had sent out an email with even a quarter of the typos they had, I probably would've lost my job.
This probably isn’t true, though. But you didn’t want to test your luck, so you took the safe route of carefully crafting your emails. The privilege is not worrying about being fired over trivial reasons.
What I've seen is that leaders often communicate brusquely downward, but formally upward - and the higher the rank, the greater the magnitude (in each direction).
I think it's a consequence of having more and more people asking you things (on the downward side), while being responsible for decisions of more critical importance (on the upward side) as you go further up the chain of command.
That fits witj my experiences. And i want to add an otjer layer. In ai times its somtimes even nice to see some typos. You Casn be pretty sure it was not written by ai.
Wow, this guy must be important.
You can prompt an LLM to add typos, though
"sent from my iphone"
Positive (tryhard) signaling: having a well designed email footer with all your contact info
Neutral signaling: no footer at all
-1 signaling: sent from my iPhone
-2 signaling: sent from my Samsung AI Family Hub 4-Door Flex Fridge
I think "Sent from my iPhone" is now less of a status symbol than it is an excuse for short replies / bad grammar.
*Please forgive any typos
At one of my previous jobs some of my coworkers and I had an in-joke about how it was possible to tell which of the emails from the CEO were written directly by him or not based on whether it used the spelling "pls" for "please" because of how often he liked to use it. It hadn't occurred to me to view this phenomenon in the way that the article does, but at least in my experience it certainly seems to be accurate.
A CEO saying “please”, regardless of how it’s spelt, is itself an anomaly ;)
I point you to Nancy Mitford's piece (and others) on U vs non-U.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
This was a, tongue in cheek, distinction between the language used by the posh and by the aspiring-posh. It's seems analogous to the OP's sense of boss vs non-boss language and diction, which I believe exists.
I think this isn't quite what "privilege" means, at least these days. People talk about "white privilege" for example, meaning that people who are white can do XYZ or avoid ABC, unlike other people.
In the example the author writes about, the privilege is not "being a bag grammar person", it's being a high-ranking person. The bad grammar is the thing that those people are able to get away with.
IMO, he's confusing the disease with the symptom, so to speak.
Separately, I would say that high-ranking people can definitely get away with short emails, and to some extent brusque emails. Bad grammar is perhaps just the next domino to topple.
I am more appalled that all those emails have that footer that says - if you’re not intended recipient you should delete immediately. Yet people see it and just copy those emails. No respect for the legal disclaimer. Now they can all be sued for ignoring that legal disclaimer, I suppose they will face justice sooner than all those people in emails.
if i sent an email to my ceo and they replied with typos and bad grammar, i wouldn't think "wow, they are flexing their privilege to be able to do that".
i would be excited that i'm being treated as a member of the inner circle and they can speak freely and casually with me.
In the country where I grew up, physicians have immense clout and are notorious for writing unintelligibly. I once pointed this out as a kid and was told by the secretary something like: the doctor is too busy to write legible prescriptions.
I'd put it the other way around: Bad Grammar is a courtesy. I run a startup that's small, but busy. I get a high frequency stream of inbound questions, notifications and asks to make decisions by my team and customers. If I don't respond or decide quickly I become a bottleneck. Likewise, if I wait, things pile up. So, rather than keep everyone waiting for me, I make a point of pulling my phone out as soon as I get a message and provide an answer straight away as much as possible. These answers are brief and to the point. And they are laden with shitty grammar. But they are almost instant and that feels better than a well formulated essay two hours later.
Having said that, I started using Gmail's "polish" feature to turn "yes" into "That sounds great, let's go ahead with it" or some such corporatism. Not sure if that's much better...
Speed is a courtesy, sure. I think polish for the sake of polish is bad, and the AI powered polishing is worse. See also: https://x.com/ClickHole/status/2020915972979425699
I had a boss who would respond with: "NO" or "OK"
Reminds me of the apocryphal story of Victor Hugo asking his publisher how his new novel was doing with a single “?”. The publisher replied “!”.
Do your boss could still save themselves 50% of the work.
I like to ask people what I did to make them yell at me when I get a message with all caps. It usually stops.
> It's almost as if, once you get to a certain level of power, you no longer need to try.
Correct. I think it's also a bit of a shibboleth now, like not wearing a suit. In former days the lower ranked employees wore jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, etc. and the bosses all wore suits and ties. Now it's the opposite at least in tech. If you see someone in "business" attire, you know they're middle management or sales and have no power, where if someone is in a tshirt and jeans they're probably a founder or executive. It's a flex to dress casual.
> Now it's the opposite at least in tech. If you see someone in "business" attire, you know they're middle management or sales and have no power, where if someone is in a tshirt and jeans they're probably a founder or executive. It's a flex to dress casual.
Eh? I've been working in tech for over 20 years. For all of that time, most people wore casual clothes.
Grammar privilege feels 90% understanding the audience and timing vs something like 10% power dynamics. As with most things where there can be a power imbalance, that does not mean those with power (e.g. managers) should not help set expectations on an even field with each of their employees anyways. Nor does it mean the other 10% of cases don't exist, just "don't ignore that 90% of this is probably one being too worried about sounding professional in every possible scenario".
Before going into the workforce, we're usually taught professionals are expected to communicate like professionals 100% of the time. It's just the safer bet to make as it's simply a lot harder (though certainly not impossible) to foul things up in a professional situation by having good grammar and well written emails than vice versa.
That said, it seems like most people I've ever actually worked with (on any level) do not like communicating 100% professionally the majority of the time (especially in small groups/directly) and may actually consider THAT disrespectful. Some from practicality ("don't waste so much time on an email we could have talked through casually in a minute" etc), some for just having different social expectations ("We've worked together for 3 years, why are you sounding like a door-to-door salesman about to make a pitch to me instead of just saying you had a thought" etc), or a laundry list of other reasons. Telling when and how much professionalism is expected is just something you have to learn to read the individual/crowd for, but it's probably a positive signal a lot less often than the author assumes it usually is.
Definitely my experience as well.
Another dimension to this is native vs 2nd language speakers.
For those of us who had to learn English, we put a lot of effort into grammar, while native speakers whip out half-baked sentences without a second thought.
From the article:
> It's almost as if, once you get to a certain level of power, you no longer need to try.
It’s relative to the power level difference between the two parties.
We’re talking about someone (your boss) who doesn’t really need to present an appearance of professionalism to their proverbial lowly underlings.
As slapdash as their response to you might appear - if you were to observe that same person composing a reply to the CEO, I'd wager that all the hallmarks of grammatical precision and professionalism would be back in spades.
I had a boss once who had "this is sent from my phone, please excuse any spelling or grammar" as his email signature
A more appropriate signature would be "Please excuse any auto-correct errors that my ducking phone might have added."
… 'as his Desktop Outlook signature'
(Although he could at least use proper grammar in the automated signature line...)
Isn’t this more about the specific generation these people represent instead of their privilege?
This is why I like to have business with Germans and Japanese, their emails are the best.
This is so yawn. Do young professionals starting out have to impress their bosses? Yes. Do bosses have to impress them? Usually not. Who cares? Power dynamics exist, it’s easy to play the grammar game, so just do it and stop pretending it’s some form of oppression.
Using language "correctly" is one of humanity's oldest class dividers. [citation needed, source: me speculating] If you personally benefit from dividing people into in- and out-groups (most of the time you do), saying you must speak a certain way is a great way to get people to self-identify on one side of that line. (Excluding cases where grammar helps with communication, that's "I don't understand you" versus "you sound poor".)
You make it hard enough that someone needs years of expensive education or has to be born in the right family that speaks the right way, and now all we can do it try to meet that arbitrary standard. Everyone will struggle, so the act of calling it out is a choice, rather than a fact. If someone lets that mask slip, IMO it's because they're not worried about being accused of occupying the wrong side of the line, rather than any lack of "trying". Trying sort of implies there is a goal to hit.
?
!
Maybe someone can clarify this but I was also pretty appalled by the grammar in the Epstein emails until someone pointed out it could be an artifact of OCR or decoding issues.
Not sure why they would have to do OCR on emails. Were they printed out? On PDF for some reason? The decoding thing I kinda get but that you can easily point out because of all the equal signs.
It's funny she mentions the horrible grammar in the leaked sony emails because that's what I remember most from it too. This one always gets a laugh from me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/marvelstudios/comments/33tkv6/actua...
At first i was about to disagree, because i thought, "ah hell nah man I'm sending emojis and shit at work all day" and then i realized, i send emojis and shit to my peers all day (well, and to my dumbass boss who i don't respect).
I think about the email i sent that was to be read by the CTO and i not only ensured it was totally correct, i asked a colleague to proofread it.
Hobbes says that talking to someone with courtesy is honor(giving them relative power), and talking trashy is dishonor(reducing their relative power).
Its not very long, but I use this in my daily life:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3207/pg3207-images.html...
I also use the 12 bullet points before that on Power.
I think its probably just having to respond to lots of messages from your phone in the middle of meetings is the job, and you'll quickly decide that getting the point across is the most important thing.
In the United states, at least in my business, we prize congeniality and sincerity. I think part of the trend the author discovered might be that experienced professionals unconsciously use informal language structures to avoid seeming pretentious.
Never thought of it that way, very interesting insight. I always thought those "K circle back" emails were fake but nope looks like they're very real.
Man, everything is privilege these days. You’re privileged to get full score on SAT, Steph Curry has 3 point privilege, Taylor Swift has singer privilege. I have nice warm blanket privilege and am currently experiencing President’s Day privilege. I remember when I had just started in engineering and experiencing new grad privilege and then receiving promotion privilege every year.
I’ve been thinking about going and getting grocery privilege today but I could use delivery privilege instead.
Loved your comment, made my day. Thanks!
Why, thank you. It was my pri—<User was banned for this comment>
Congratulations on learning a new word
They’re so close to getting it!
How sad I’m missing literacy privilege but fortunately looks like I’ve got downvote privilege so that will make up for it.
Though, after thinking about it, I have illiteracy privilege so there’s that too.