You’d never say “a green old little lovely knife”. You couldn’t explain why. That’s the most interesting thing about it.

“Cheugy” was the word for things that used to be cool. Then everyone started saying it, and it became the best example of itself.

If a British manager tables your proposal, it’s on the agenda. If an American one does, it’s dead. English has dozens of words that mean their own opposite, and some of them are hiding in your board papers.

One of the pioneers of speech recognition is said to have joked that his system got better every time he fired a linguist. He had a point. So why should a linguist have anything to say about AI now?

“The system flagged it.” “The algorithm declined it.” “AI decided.” Notice who’s missing from every one of those sentences.

“Equality” and “equity” sound like near-twins, and organisations often use them as if they were. They aren’t, and the argument between them is mostly an argument about a word nobody says out loud.

England once had a Lord Chief Justice called Igor Judge. The world’s fastest man is called Bolt. Coincidence, or something stranger?

Ms wasn’t invented in the 1970s. It was proposed in 1901, and its two siblings were once the very same word.

The continent’s name comes from a Latin word for the south wind, a land nobody had seen, and a Spanish explorer’s pun on the Austrian royal family.

The risk with AI isn’t that it’s too smart or too stupid. It’s that it’s both, often in the same answer, and it sounds exactly the same either way.

My youngest son is three different ages, depending on who’s counting. None of them is wrong.

Every organisation has rules, and almost every organisation also claims to have “values”. The trouble starts when they disagree, and nobody has said who gets to decide.

Finish this sentence: the cat sat on the… You just did what AI does, and understanding that is the most useful thing anyone can know about it.

Say “record” two different ways and you’ve said two different words. English hides a whole layer of meaning in where you put the emphasis, and it vanishes the moment you write it down.

Most arguments about AI are really arguments about words. “Intelligent”, “understands”, “thinks” and “hallucinates” are doing a lot of work, and very little of it is precise.

Spam is the only word I know that went from a pantry to a comedy sketch to every email server on earth, without ever really changing what it meant.

In early 2020, people waited anxiously for the World Health Organization to say one word. It turned out to be a very old word, and a very democratic one.

The word is barely a century old. The thing it describes has been annoying people since at least the Middle Ages, and one medieval poet put Jesus on record against it.

Everyone left the meeting agreeing to be “customer-centric”. Six months later, sales, operations and finance are still fighting about what it meant.

The most dangerous document in your organisation isn’t the badly written one. It’s the beautifully written one that nobody can explain.