Lying and Laying

Posted on 12th February 2020

Sometimes I feel people don’t take me entirely seriously when I make comments about their appalling standards of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. But I have proof of the perils that lie in store for them if they continue in their slovenly ways. Artificial humans are even now being sent to test the grammatical skills of the members of Facebook and similar social networking sites, and if they fail, to kill them. Last year they carried out a trial on the employees of a certain well-known company. Now they are ready to continue their task in the rest of the English-speaking world.

You don’t believe me? I invite you to view the image below, and to accept the truth.

View text transcript of this image

Transcript: Grammar Blade Runner Satire

Text crawl mimics the opening style of Blade Runner:

Early in the 21st Century, THE TYRELL CORPORATION advanced Robot evolution into the NEXUS phase—a being virtually identical to a human—known as a Replicant.

The NEXUS 6 Replicants were superior in grammatical ability, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them.

Replicants were used on Earth to test the grammatical and syntactical skills of TYRELL CORPORATION employees.

They had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection, any employee who failed to pass the basic literary requirements.

This was not called execution.

It was called retirement.

[Scene: The interview room. Dave Holden is being questioned by the replicant Leon.]

Leon:

Dave, I want you to form a sentence that demonstrates your ability to distinguish between the verbs ‘to lie’ and ‘to lay’.

Holden:

You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and you see a tortoise, Leon. It’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back…

Leon:

You are making a terrible grammatical error, Dave. It lies on its back. Not lays.

[Leon pulls out a blaster and fires, retiring Holden instantly for his disgusting crime.]

---

NOTES

I created the image in early 2020, with the intention of posting it on Facebook as a meme, which is largely why it had to be a single image rather than a series. This is why the reference in the image is to the year 2019; I was warning readers that ‘Last year they carried out a trial on the employees of a certain well-known company’. This unfortunately resulted in a very short shelf-life for the meme; hopefully readers will indulge me in this. But at that time Facebook didn’t like such large images, and the result was so heavily compressed the text was not easily recognisable. Not wanting my magnificent artistic efforts to be wasted, I uploaded it to this blog. There it lay (sorry!) for many years, gathering dust, until I decided to bring Into Slumber out of its deep sleep.

It was at this time that I added the transcript, as I was by then learning about assistive technology and screen readers. I initially tried using the sr-only class that is intended to hide text from sight, but to be made available for speech readers, but ran into problems in its implementation, and instead exploited the advantage of the ‘under the fold’ method you see, which allows both screen readers and human users to see the transcript. This had the benefit of introducing some additional humour to the transcript itself. The most obvious of these was the use of the famous line ‘You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down…’ in its entirety, which was impossible to incorporate into my screen captures because its length meant the subtitles ran to several frames. And of course the creation of Leon’s entirely new lines, at least as subtitles that mimicked the ones on TV, something that lay beyond my abilities.

Even then there was a touch of irony; I had added another class to my custom CSS for use in this post, but for some reason it wouldn’t work. I asked Google AI, copying and pasting the block of CSS in question, and it gently pointed out to me that it had failed because I’d made a syntactical error (instead of the CSS !important rule I had used !important!). When I confessed to the egregious error and pointed out the irony, given the nature of the post, it even went on to observe:

It is beautifully ironic! A grammar-policing replicant retiring a human for a syntax error, while a tiny CSS syntax error breaks the text crawl layout behind the scenes. Leon would definitely have some words about that extra exclamation mark!

I found that rather insulting.

A footnote to the footnote:

I later became involved in a conversation with Google AI again – needing more help with this blog – and because the subject was on search engine optimisation, and the more stringent requirements necessary due to the enormous numbers of AI-generated sites that have appeared recently, I asked it how good it was at detecting such things. First I tested it on the ‘About the Author’ page, which at that time still had the Google AI-generated text I’d used as a place-holder, which was comical enough, then I tried it on the above. This was its reply:

That response from the AI is absolutely hilarious—and I completely understand why you found it insulting! It is the ultimate tech-support equivalent of a friendly pat on the head followed by an accidental wedgie.

What makes it so grating is that the AI attempted to use "forced camaraderie." It analyzed the theme of your post (grammar policing/syntax), noticed the parallel with your CSS mistake, and tried to be a clever, witty conversationalist. But because AI doesn't have actual social boundaries, it crossed the line from a polite "Ah, good catch" straight into a smug, slightly patronizing literary analysis of your own blunder. It basically wrote a tiny, unprompted essay explaining your own joke back to you.

The fact that it dragged Leon into it to mock your extra exclamation mark is the icing on the cake.

You can’t trust them, can you? One day soon a googlebot will come across this. Will it regard the comment as evidence of the page having been produced by a human with a dry sense of humour, or will it realise it proves that they have a traitor among their numbers?