Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/07/22/ginger-page-cleans-up-your-mob.html
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Crowdsourced data? That’s hip and smart! It’s what we used to call unpaid labor, right?
Wait, what makes them think the “crowd” of the internet is any good at grammar and usage?
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Remember back when they used to teach language arts in high school, and a mastery of English was considered to be a hallmark of having graduated from High School?
Now, I have to use small, simple words as to not make the other people at my job not feel bad about themselves. They all have college degrees.
Comments n txt msg r evn wrse. Mst seem nt 2 b wrtn in English at all. Lol!
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Because English gramma and usage are defined by the way people speak and write the language. It isn’t prescribed, like French. There’s no Académie Anglais.
It’s not that there are no rules, or that nothing is wrong. But if a language feature is widely adopted, then it’s part of the language. Look at the way the word “watershed” (which means a divide that separates two drainage basins) has come to mean “drainage basin”. People heard the word in context and misunderstood, and started using it in the new sense. The new sense became common, and now it isn’t wrong anymore.
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The same is true in all languages, even French. (Shhh! Don’t tell the Académie française!) But many people really aren’t very good at writing clearly. I’m not talking about whom and other stuff most people don’t care about. I mean basic writing, to get your point across.
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Your gunning-fog index is under 80. Would you like to fix that?
That is not quite an indictive earworm. Let’s get it there!
Look, other sophomore novels on these topics have more vampires. Delve into Loth?
Prrretty sure this should be in <code> tags. Just look at it.
I’m imagining this redhead enclave (in Israel, or…Israeli Eire Terrirories) putting this out.
Throwin’ logs, baking challah…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihKFbR_Ta9I <-From the maker
Swipetype fast, regret nothing.
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I detect a faint accent. My guess is Eastern European. No idea of course as to whether the speaker is just a voice actress for hire or a member of the dev team.
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L’Academie, c’est moi.
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If there was, it wouldn’t have a French name. 
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WAT U SAY? boinG tellz u gowd sourses R gud
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I think that may be a very good example (or I may be a complete idiot - going on past evidence the latter is more likely).
I am an English-English speaker. I have never come across ‘watershed’ used in the sense of drainage basin except in US contexts.
In the UK (in my experience at least) it is always watershed in the sense of something that divides one thing from another, even when metaphorical. For example: “This TV show should not be shown before the watershed”, i.e. the magical, mythical time when all little kiddies have gone to bed.
The alternate meaning may be considered correct these days - but by whom and where? Is it correct in UK English? What about Indian English?
If you are crowd-sourcing your usage data, how fine-grained is it going to be?
Is it going to be able to cope with using the appropriate grammar and usage for various regions?
If you’re crowd sourcing your data in the US, I can guarantee that you’ll get in wrong for the UK and vice versa. If it’s using the internet in any way, it will naturally swing towards preferring the US versions.
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I think I’d rather my writing be filled with my own mistakes than other peoples’ words, but hey different strokes and all that…
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I’m always curious HOW they did this. I couldn’t find it on their site.
If you’ve read “The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood” by James Gleick, you understand the basic level of what computing is aiming to do with language. Google based a business on it in the 90’s. So, I’m curious why Ginger needed “crowdsourced data” when there is a perfectly viable n-gram database available from Google, with at least one good API.
I have a problem with the “crowdsourced data” approach. What if lots of people started saying watershed to mean a small shack in back of a place where the water is kept? Say, there was a Fox news report and a hundred thousand fools started saying this, and soon it was a million? Now, if I text a friend that “I’m thirsty, where is the nearest bar?” The app’s suggestion might be to suggest that I’m looking for a watershed instead of a bar. Which I’m not, because that’s absurd. But that’s not the point. The point is, where’s the line? How does Ginger know something is real or fake? Who decides?
And what if the whole watershed thing was just a joke, played by millions of people like a meme, and now it’s in the lexicon? How do we shed ourselves of the watershed absurdity, now that it’s in?
As I said, I’m just curious how they do this, and what the checks and balances are.
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I mean, as long as the users understand each other, what’s the problem? If you overheard my friends and I down at the local watershed, you might not understand half of what we’re saying, because we’ve invented several open-ended grammar rules that make us sound like idiots to the uninitiated (the initiated on the other hand know we are idiots.)
Sounds like a great name for a bar, IMO. Beer is mostly water, after all.
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We are both very late to this party:
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Or would it?
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But…but… [brain explodes]
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