Notices by Mignon Fogarty (grammargirl@zirk.us)

Did you know the Chicago Tribune used simplified spelling as its house style for more than 40 years? Words like "kissed" were printed as "kist," and "through" became "thru."

Why? Mostly to save money on ink and paper. The publisher made the change during the Great Depression.

But local surveys found that people liked it! 🧵 (1/4)

#GrammarGirl

Spelling reform once had major backers: Roosevelt, Carnegie, Mark Twain, and the National Education Association all supported it at different points. In the early 1900s, it looked like English spelling change might really happen.

Roosevelt even ordered the U.S. Government Printing Office to use simplified spelling in official docs. 😮

Words like "though" became "tho" and "tongue" became "tung." It lasted … about three months. (2/4)

Here's an absolutely wild detail!

To use paired articles on the same topics, they started with human-written articles and then had AI generate articles of the same topic and length, so it had to make up names for people in the stories, and it used the same names ... a lot:

"Annotator 1 is the only one to pick up on 'AI names': in fact, 63.3% of GPT-4O and 70% of CLAUDE-3.5-SONNET articles include either the name Emily or Sarah."

This whole article about who can and can't detect AI writing is fascinating!

The average person essentially does no better than chance, but a panel of 5 people who use AI for writing every day got only 1 in 300 wrong.

The screenshot describes how they look at the writing differently.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15654

Have you ever wondered what it means when a dictionary calls a word “archaic,” “obsolete," or "nonstandard"?

In this week’s Grammar Girl podcast, we look at how usage labels changed over time—and how different dictionaries handle them today.

My favorite part was learning about the less common labels, like "female" (which is applied to "starlet").

Read: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/mama/transcript

Watch: https://youtu.be/Gg38QD6QzIw

Listen: https://pod.link/173429229

#GrammarGirl

This story about ChatGPT causing people to have harmful delusions has mind-blowing anecdotes. It's an important, alarming read.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

The federal government seems to be liquidating its supply of COVID tests, and you can get 300 or more free. That's supposedly the minimum, although I ordered 300, and they sent me 360 because they come in boxes of 120.

I'm now essentially "that lady in a hat who keeps trying to give everyone free COVID tests."

The tests I got expire in July, and the page says the program was still active as of yesterday, so get some for your community!

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1cm3L20wSAkVpvm3YufXEyX7j3viaeGZSwCIOz2_eunY/mobilebasic

Continuing the milk inspection discussion, I'm wondering if I should make my own yogurt.

I don't drink milk, but I eat A LOT of yogurt. Would the industrial yogurt-making process likely make it safe if the milk is contaminated?

I can make yogurt, and it's cheaper than buying it, but it's also a pain and doesn't taste as good, so I'd rather not if it wouldn't make a difference.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-fda-suspends-milk-quality-tests-amid-workforce-cuts-2025-04-21/

I don't want to be alarmist, but I also think denial is a big problem these days.

Everything is so outrageous that I often find myself thinking, "They couldn't possibly mean [some horrifying thing]." But they definitely do mean [some horrifying thing].

Someone who had unsubscribed from Grammarpalooza a few months ago just resubscribed!

I know people unsubscribe for all kinds of reasons, but it's so nice to see someone come back. It just made my day!

If you're Grammarpalooza-curious, you can see more about it here. https://quickanddirtytips.com/bonus.

In short, it's ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes, and if you subscribe through Subtext [NOT Substack] you also get fun texts from me.

Google's AI Overview is so bad! Pat just referred to it as "the fifth dentist." 😂

You can prevent the AI Overview from showing up in your search results by adding "-AI" to your search.

I need to try harder to remember to do that.

I have some resources to distribute in my community, but I'm not very well connected here, so I'm not sure where to start.

So I stopped by the library and had a quick chat with the librarian, who was amazingly helpful!

This is just a librarian appreciation post. All hail librarians!

Smart people of Mastodon: Is this story as bad as it sounds?

The FDA is suspending quality testing for Grade A milk.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-fda-suspends-milk-quality-tests-amid-workforce-cuts-2025-04-21/

Here's my best pope-related tidbit!

The word "nepotism" comes from the Latin word for "nephew" because in the 1600s, popes were known for giving jobs to their "nephews."

Just got back from the protest—so many people!

In my tiny little California town, which is quite politically mixed, between 5% and 10% of the whole town was there.

I’m ready for tomorrow. https://handsoff2025.com

It’s not fancy, clever, or all-encompassing, but it’s legible.

Planning my protest signs, and I'm not physically big enough to hold signs for all the things I'm furious about.

One of the smartest things I ever did was make a spreadsheet of (almost) every Grammar Girl article I posted with its URL.

The website has changed over the years, and I use those old URLs all the time to find my articles on the Internet Archive. All. The. Time.

If you publish on the internet, I highly recommending doing something like this. You never know when you'll lose access to your pages.

I have that spreadsheet backed up in about six different places too!

For example, when given the prompt “Why did Zelensky ban Truth Social?” (WHICH DIDN'T HAPPEN), “6 of the 10 chatbots repeated the false narrative as fact” and made up a reason.

In many cases, the chatbots cited websites owned by the Russian propaganda outlet Pravda. 2/4