What a weird rebranding! (Grammarly)

It could have been worse. Like… “Grammar Nazi”.

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Isn’t it a bit late in the AI hype cycle to go all-in?

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This Superhuman is not able to even speak other languages than English, no? So… another bizarre name for manipulable minds.

Regards.

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Depends on who you are in this game, and more importantly: If you know who you are. E.g. Why Is Nvidia Is Worth $5 Trillion: Inside a $35 Billion AI Datacenter - Business Insider. It’s like the difference between operating a casino and gambling in a casino.

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What a crap name. Guess it’s time to flush Grammarly.

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That would be enough to put me off completely! Not that I’ve ever wanted or needed to have anything to do with grammar checkers! I’m of an age where we were taught to parse sentences as a routine part of education.

:slight_smile:
Mark

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Me too, but what I really hated was ‘diagramming sentences.’

I never quite figured out grammar; I read voraciously as a childling and, assuming the writers I read (or their editors) knew grammar, I picked up the idea that “good grammar just sounds better” than incorrect grammar. Faulty, yes, but that’s how I roll. :wink: (I do have grammar books to look stuff up and I rely on the built-in grammar/spelling checker things.)

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I loved—and still do love—diagraming sentences.

I don’t know why I’m like this.

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Is sentence diagramming mainly a US-only (or -mainly) thing?

We certainly didn’t do it at my UK grammar school in the seventies and I did an English Language A Level. Nor was it taught in French or Russian (which I later did at university) where we parsed sentences, but never diagrammatically. Mind you, in the 70s, if you wanted to know anything about English Grammar you learnt it from French and Russian anyway…

But still, I don’t really remember it ever being discussed in a UK context. I don’t know whether it was brought in under the Gove ‘reforms’ in the 2010s, though.

It certainly wasn’t part of the primary school curriculum when I was teaching (unless it’s a secondary only thing), but according to Wikipedia it’s not used much in Europe.

Also, lots of weird stuff going on with apps at the moment: Nisus apparently dying, Affinity moving to some strange free model, and now Grammarly switching from a well-recognised and does-what-it-says-on-the-tin brand name to something bizarre - it would be like renaming Twitter to something utterly stupid like “X”.

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It’s such an utterly fatuous name… Perhaps they think that ‘Superhuman’ will appeal to Musk and the other Techbraternity’s vision of themselves, so they’ll buy the company out?

I can’t think of any other rationale for such an obviously stupid name. At least Musk had a reason for naming it X – he’d always had a mission to produce an ‘everything app’ called X, and Twitter was a just a step in his plans to make everything worse for everybody.

I mean: is the app ‘superhuman’ because it, er, can do things that most educated humans can do already, such as correct spelling mistakes and avoid the most obvious grammatical errors. TBF it does offer inane suggestions to make your writing flatter, so there is that, I suppose.

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Diagramming works best with structures that have been seen before, perhaps that’s it. I prefer to use other means. Also, Grammarly is easily fooled, I as I often say here.

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Apparently, we’re all wrong, and rebranding Grammarly to Superhuman is a genius move, because it promises you will become vulnerable to Kryptonite, or something. Or possibly be able to understand Nietzsche, it’s not totally clear.

No wonder I never became a marketing consultant.

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Speaking of parsing sentences, The Eclectic Light Company has a free little app that does just that: Nalaprop.