It was much funnier the way it was written, demonstrating the importance of noting unusual punctuation in a sentence.
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I came here to say something like that. “The” indicates not necessarily a specific owl we know, but owl-ness, or owl-itude, the essence or symbol, and its role in delivering portents.
Also, earlier someone said it’s an AI. Is it? Really? Or is it just a statistical analysis? I hope to read the paper later today, but it looks like a good old-fashioned statistical analysis to me…
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That’s a Shakespearean “sausage fest”. He told me whence last we spook…
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Does that mean that ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is even creepier since it has both THE lark and THE nightingale?
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Romeo and Juliet, Act 3 Scene 5:
Juliet: Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.
Romeo: It was the lark, the herald of the morn
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It is a weird word.
I wonder how non-native speakers divine the different nuances of
the two “the” words: THə / thuh and T͟Hē / thee.
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/raises hand
It was I who claimed the AI.
You’re right, it’s a word-frequency analysis. I projected AI onto it.
From the article: “Maybe they should do a word-frequency analysis of Macbeth . Perhaps it’d show the recurrence of certain words that would help identify the source of floating menace. So they did an analysis of the “log-likehood” of words in the play. “Log likelihood” is a metric of whether a word is used more or less often than normal.”
Edited for clarity. Also, a recommended read. 
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Terrifying!
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A pedants’ fest, surely?
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Touch
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I’m not sure I understand your question. ESL students rarely have trouble distinguishing between a schwa and a high front vowel, nor between a definite determiner and a second person familiar/singular accusative pronoun.
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Actually, in THAT context it would be much creepier for for some to say “Oh, there goes a Batman”
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Yep, hopped up histograms. Actual AI NLP people would have known that you have to leave out the stop words to get any actually meaningful results.
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Is it “Hot potato, off his drawers, Puck will make amends!” or “Hot potato, orchestra stalls, Puck will make amends!”?
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According to Baldrick
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I long ago took to talking about my nerdy hobbies (or, if not nerdy, ones that generally require a bit more throat-clearing) by throwing a “the” in front of it. Somehow, to my ears, it makes it sound more normal. e.g., the geocaching, the Dungeons & Dragons, the CrossFit. Maybe this is what I was going after subconsciously – by adding the definite article, it assumes (implies?) the listener already has some familiarity with it.
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Or if it’s several, use the collective noun, a Crusade of Batmen. (A Troop of Supermen, a School of Aquamen…)
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I thought for sure it was going to be “■■■■■”
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