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Stan Carey

@stancarey.bsky.social

4.5K followers 250 following 1.6K posts

Editor, writer, lapsed biologist in the west of Ireland Copy-editing, writing: https://stancarey.com Language: https://stancarey.wordpress.com Strong language: https://stronglang.wordpress.com 🎞 https://letterboxd.com/stancarey 🦣 @[email protected]

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Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · Nov 10

I should introduce myself, now that the world is ending. I'm a freelance copy-editor/proofreader from Ireland. And I write, mostly about language: stancarey.com
stancarey.wordpress.com

I hike a bit and always have a book on the go and a film in mind. Background in biology; environmentalist at heart

Stan Carey editing and proofreading | Tidy, tighten, or transform your text

stancarey.com

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Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 1h

The eye-like splash in the bottom left had me puzzling what creature this was: a crow? a giant rat? surely not. oh, a dog? Alt text set me straight :D

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Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 16h

I wouldn't recommend lowercasing E.E. Cummings's name, btw, since it wasn't his preference web.archive.org/web/20110728...

decapitalization of E. E. Cummings

web.archive.org

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Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 16h

He absolutely will

Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 16h

There will never be too many reasons to do just this

Reposted by Stan Carey

Canberra Tragic @emoneconomist.bsky.social · 22h

One of my favourite examples, referring to Craig Venter who founded Celera Genomics and pioneered the shotgun sequencing method used on the Human Genome Project (excerpt from 'The Martians' by Kim Stanley Robinson):

"So - in that context - you think it makes sense for me to pursue this fossil junk DNA?"
"Well, sure. What do you mean? It's sure to tell us interesting things."
"It's incredibly slow."
"Why don't you read off a long sequence, brew it up and venter it, and see what you get?"
Smith shrugged. Whole-genome shotgun sequencing struck him as slipshod, but it was

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Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 18h

E.E. Cummings once had a collection of poems rejected by 14 publishers. When he eventually got it published as "No Thanks" in 1935, he dedicated it to those 14 publishers in a visual poem shaped like a funeral urn

Centre-aligned poem whose lines forms the shape of a funeral urn:

TO
Farrar & Rinehart
Simon & Schuster
Coward-McCann
Limited Editions
Harcourt, Brace
Random House
Equinox Press
Smith & Haas
Viking Press
Knopf
Dutton
Harper's
Scribner's
Covici, Friede

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Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 21h

That's a lovely example, and his name (I remember it from my genetics-studying days) works better as a verb than most

Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 21h

Thank you! I'm glad I wrote this up at the time instead of leaving it to rot or vanish on Twitter

Reposted by Stan Carey

Jesse Sheidlower @jessesword.com · 1d

Here's one additional example, albeit from a self-published novel (Ryan Rayston, The Quiet Sound of Disappearing, 2011):

Screenshot from a book, reading in relevant part "The next day, ready to Agatha Christie the information, I applied for a job at Elan. I was hired on the spot."

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Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 22h

That's perfectly cromulent. Thanks, Jesse!

Reposted by Stan Carey

iucounu @iucounu.bsky.social · 1d

My wife uses Poirot as a verb. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll Poirot that,’ she says, when she’s going to ferret out some bit of gossip

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Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 22h

Excellent – this is just the kind of thing I was hoping to hear. (I've added it in an update to the post)

Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 1d

Took me a while to register the pun too, because my dialect is rhotic – i.e., it pronounces the "r" in "shorn". The key idea in this whole discussion is rhoticity en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhotici...

Rhoticity in English - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 1d

It's probably not well known outside of linguistics circles – much of it went over my head a lot of the time. But I loved its humour when I understood it (I used to link to it from my blog sometimes) and am sorry to see it end.

Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 1d

I wondered about that distinction too. I didn't read OpenAI's report, but it was also discussed a little in the latest episode of @manymindspod.bsky.social: manyminds.libsyn.com/the-age-of-s...

Many Minds: The age of social AI

AI therapists and caregivers. Digital tutors and advisors and friends. Artificial lovers. Griefbots trained to imitate dead loved ones. Welcome, to the bustling world of AI-powered chatbots. This was ...

manyminds.libsyn.com

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Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 1d

Yeah, it's been such a fixture. Huge credit to them for sustaining it this long

Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 1d

"Language has been verbing for as long as it has languaged." New post on Agatha Christie – as a verb stancarey.wordpress.com/2025/10/11/t...

to Agatha Christie (v.tr.)

The conversion of nouns to verbs (to impact, to medal, to leverage, to architect) is a continual object of criticism and word rage. But language has been verbing for as long as it has languaged. In…

stancarey.wordpress.com

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Reposted by Stan Carey

James 🎃 Harbeck @sesquiotic.bsky.social · 6d

Yeah, I got several gigs writing articles on language, and I started @stronglang.bsky.social with @stancarey.bsky.social , and I met a whole bunch of people who are friends now.

Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · 7d

Has anything great happened in your life because of social media?

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Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 1d

"The marginalisation of local and Indigenous knowledge has long been driven by entrenched power structures. GenAI puts this process on steroids."

More good reasons to resist and refuse this technology

Aeon Magazine @aeon.co · 1d

The training data for generative AI is far from the sum total of human knowledge. As well as oral cultures, many languages are absent, creating significant blindspots in AI’s understanding of human experience

Generative AI has access to a small slice of human knowledge | Aeon Essays

Huge swathes of human knowledge are missing from the internet. By definition, generative AI is shockingly ignorant too

buff.ly

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Reposted by Stan Carey

Jessica Kant @jessdkant.bsky.social · 5d

To be candid, I want the bubble to burst. Because it will eventually and inevitably, but the longer the current charade goes on the more our planet and communities are decimated— and the more dependent we become on the few powerful people left who control those resources.

Jessica Kant @jessdkant.bsky.social · 5d

Energy requirements for AI mean that the only way for the bubble not to burst would require companies to multiply their carbon footprint to an unimaginable degree. Right now, while AI is barely functional and mostly a novelty for the lazy, it requires so much energy that data centers rival cities.

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Reposted by Stan Carey

Jessica Kant @jessdkant.bsky.social · 5d

So when I hear of students being encouraged to use GPT in college I don’t hear innovation. I hear cognitive atrophy, the inability to think critically for oneself, and total dependence on vulnerable centralized repositories of data for knowledge without ever understanding how knowledge is generated.

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Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 1d

2013 feels like an entire lifetime ago in internet years

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Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 1d

I reviewed SpecGram's Essential Guide to Linguistics back in 2013 stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/09/05/b...

Book Review: The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics

Every serious field of study deserves a satirical wing, and linguistics is blessed in this regard with Speculative Grammarian, a journal some say is now centuries old. SpecGram, as it’s known to fa…

stancarey.wordpress.com

Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 1d

Speculative Grammarian, a long-running publication of satirical linguistics, is winding down specgram.com #linguistics

SpecGram—Speculative Grammarian

Speculative Grammarian: the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics.

specgram.com

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Stan Carey @stancarey.bsky.social · 3d

Yes: "would've" is a contraction of "would have". I address this in paragraph 1.