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I’m not on Quora, but occasionally see grammar posts, and this one took me a minute to understand. This explanation is the best explanation I saw. It’s a good question, and once you understand the answer, I think it does contribute to “Grammar Mastery.”
If you’re on Quora, and you’re interested in grammar, you will probably find it interesting.
Grammar Mastery & Education Insights
The first “her” and “him” in these sentences are indirect object pronouns.
Think of them as replacing nouns, e.g. “Give Mary the book.” “Give Jim the book”.
The second “her’ and “him” in these sentences should be possessive adjectives.
In the first sentence, the second “her” is a possessive adjective.
(We’re talking about her book.}
But the second “him” is not a posessive adjective. The possessive adjective needed is ‘”his”.
“Give hm his book.”
(We’re talking about his book.)
Q. Hello! In the examples in CMOS 8.48, can you clarify why Southern California, Northern California, West Tennessee, East Tennessee, and Middle Tennessee get capitalized, whereas western Arizona, eastern Massachusetts, southern Minnesota, northwest Illinois, and central Illinois do not?
A. Southern California and Northern California are capitalized because they have become recognized beyond their borders as the names of two geographic and cultural entities. East, West, and Middle Tennessee are capitalized as the names of the three “grand divisions” in that state, a usage that has become widely accepted; see, among other sources, the entry for “Tennessee” in Britannica. (Many sources style these as the Grand Divisions—with initial capitals—including this page from the Tennessee Historical Society. Tennessee’s state constitution, on the other hand, uses lowercase, and it doesn’t name the three divisions.)
As for the other examples in your question, each of those is more likely to be used generically (i.e., to refer to the western or other portion of a state) rather than as a proper noun. And though any of them might be capitalized in local usage (as in a travel guide extolling the virtues of a certain region), such usage shouldn’t necessarily determine your own (or that of your author). When in doubt, use lowercase for terms like western at the state level and caps for national or global regions.
Q. Would you use a comma after the verb read in fiction when written text is introduced by that word? Does it matter whether the text is presented as a sentence? For example,
The sign read Keep Out.
versus
The sign read, “Thank you for not smoking.”
As a copyeditor I am always unsure whether read is considered a variation of such terms as said, replied, asked, wrote, or the like. Perhaps I must consider whether the grammar and syntax of the quoted material is separate from the text that introduces it?
A. You don’t normally need a comma before words introduced by the verb read—or said, for that matter—used in the sense of “consisted of (or included) the word(s).” And though quotation marks are helpful in some cases, they can usually be omitted in favor of title case for shorter signs (see CMOS 7.64):
The sign read “Thank you for not smoking.”
or
The sign read Thank You for Not Smoking.
Use a comma only in the rare event that read is used as a speech tag (in which case the quoted words would be considered to be syntactically independent relative to the surrounding sentence; see CMOS 12.14):
I asked, “Could you tell me what that sign says?”
Squinting through the haze, she read, “ ‘Thank you for not smoking.’ ”
Note the nested single quotation marks, which clarify that the quoted speaker is quoting something in turn (see also CMOS 12.46 and 6.11).
Apr 19, 2025
So let’s get one thing out of the way: I think “AI literacy” is a dangerous device of neoliberal education and it deserves to be dismissed out of hand.
I don’t like that declaring this will immediately turn off half my audience, but I think it’s only fair to say it up front.
This has a lot to do with my feelings about generative AI technologies, their developers, their blood diamond genesis, and their ugly consequences for those who use them and those who are impacted by their use.
But it has a lot more to do with what literacy is.
Up to the mid-twentieth century, when people spoke about literacy they were talking about being able to use letters. It was an entirely mechanical concept that had everything to do with making and interpreting the marks of language:
“A person is literate who can with understanding both read and write a short simple statement on his everyday life.” —UNESCO, 1978, p. 18
Then, around the middle of the century, the concept of functional literacy was defined:
“A person is functionally literate who can engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning of his group and community and also for enabling him to continue to use reading, writing and calculation for his own and the community’s development.” —UNESCO, 1978, p. 18
These definitions were developed for statistical purposes, in order to determine and track the scale of illiteracy in the world.
But although functional literacy brought with it the socio-cultural concepts of community participation and development, it was still itself defined by the narrow view of literacy as the skills of “reading, writing and calculation”.
In the fifty or so years since, we have begun to think of literacies in the plural, as a wide array of functionings essential to engaging in communication in the present world. Financial literacy, digital literacy and critical literacy are just a few of many examples.
The term multiliteracies was introduced in the 1990s by the New London Group, who argued that contemporary literacy education needed to account for:
“understanding and competent control of representational forms that are becoming increasingly significant in the overall communications environment”
—New London Group, 1996, p. 61
Their point was that these forms were growing increasingly fragmented. In a global and multicultural present, reading and writing English words on a printed page simply wasn’t enough to claim literacy any more.
One of my favourite definitions of plural literacies is from James Paul Gee, who conceptualised literacy as discourse fluency. He wrote that:
“I define literacy as the mastery of or fluent control over a secondary Discourse”
—Gee, 1989, p. 9
Gee defined discourses as “saying (writing)—doing—being—valuing—believing combinations” (p. 6). In his view, a primary discourse is, simply, the one we’re born into: “All humans, barring serious disorder, get one form of discourse free” (Gee, 1987, p. 5). For him, that’s the oral communication between parent and child. It’s the first form of linguistic communication we learn. (For Helen Keller, who couldn’t hear or see, you could say that was hand-speaking.)
Every other discourse is somehow encrypted and must be unlocked to be read. Reading is an act of translation. Writing is the ability to synthesise that translation into new representations of the discourse.
Can you see how how in this view of literacy, “reading and writing” is a metaphor for all the ways in which communication can be culturally encoded?
Academic literacy is the capacity to interpret and perform scholarly cultural signals to access and transmit academic knowledge.
Financial literacy is the capacity to comprehend and engage with accounting terms, conventions and practices to manage and acquire money.
Media literacy is the capacity to decrypt and encode messages through culturally-structured modes like news journalism, television, websites, this blog.
To underline this clearly, literacy is about communication.
I’m giving this lecture because I am so, so, so utterly sick of the calls for embedding “AI literacy” in education and workforce development on the grounds that generative AI capabilities are somehow now essential for participation in the world.
First of all, they aren’t essential.
Second, they aren’t literacy.
Using AI is not about communicating. It’s about avoiding communicating. It’s about not reading, not writing, not drawing, not seeing. It’s about ceding our powers of expression and comprehension to digital apps that will cushion us from fully participating in our own lives.
Generative AI use is degenerative to literacy.
You could argue that what’s needed is “critical AI literacy”. We need to be able to recognise when this is happening, how, and why.
And I support what you’re trying to say, but pull the middle bit, please.
That’s critical literacy. That’s not new. And if it’s just occurred to you, I’m sorry to say you’re about half a century behind.
I’m happy to chat about how using generative AI doesn’t have to mean ceding all our powers of understanding and expression. Look, I’ve had students who have effectively used it as a scaffold to engage with a meaningful secondary discourse (academic literacy). And that’s wonderful. But it’s a scaffold, not the thing itself. My aim is for the student to achieve the actual skill. I’m genuinely ok with training wheels, but I ultimately want to see you ride without them. Because the irony is this: if you can’t ride without them, you can’t actually ride with them either.
Far more frequently, what I see is students attempting to integrate generative AI1 into their workflows, and achieving regressive results. Demonstrating poorer critical literacy than before. Using poor judgement. In some cases, bordering on academic misconduct. And let me be clear, these uses are in good faith.
The only thing that can remedy this is communication. Actual, non-outsourced communication. Banning AI is a way of communicating that this is bad and we don’t support it (although it’s entirely symbolic and unenforceable). Assigning poor grades is a way of communicating that the integration was unsuccessful (but punishes the student for earnestly trying to participate in a practice increasingly touted as essential).
There are all sorts of ways we can communicate with our students about generative AI.
But trying to sell them ‘“AI literacy” is a way that will actively hurt them.
On “generative AI”: I’m going to keep spelling this out. No more abbreviations. We need to get used to recognising that LLMs and image-generating GANs are a very, very narrow subset of machine learning technologies, with a miniscule set of viable use cases.
The Sun-Times’ publishing of fake books shows what happens when media outlets hollow out their newsrooms and replace humans with tech.
Parker Molloy
May 20
The Chicago Sun-Times just published a summer reading list with one major problem: most of the books don’t exist. Titles like Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende and The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir sound plausible enough, but they’re completely fictional—fabricated by AI and published without anyone catching the error. Of the fifteen books recommended in the list, a full ten of them are entirely made up.
According to 404 Media, Marco Buscaglia, who created the content, admitted that the list was AI-generated. “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses,” Buscaglia told 404 Media. “On me 100 percent and I’m completely embarrassed.”
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The article appeared in a 64-page promotional section called “Heat Index,” which wasn’t specific to Chicago but was designed as a generic insert for various publications across the country. Despite being published in the Sun-Times, it wasn’t created or approved by the newspaper’s editorial team. After the fake books were spotted and went viral on Bluesky, the Sun-Times posted: “We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak. It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom. We value your trust in our reporting and take this very seriously.”
According to Ars Technica’s analysis, only five of the fifteen recommended books in the list actually exist, with the rest being hallucinated titles falsely attributed to real authors. Books by Isabel Allende, Andy Weir, Brit Bennett, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Min Jin Lee, Percival Everett, Delia Owens, Rumaan Alam, Rebecca Makkai, and Maggie O’Farrell don’t exist, while a handful of others mentioned are real.
This is exactly the kind of thing that happens when AI gets deployed as a way to cut costs. And it’s going to keep happening.
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The most telling aspect of this story isn’t the AI failure itself — we all know AI hallucinates facts — it’s the context in which it happened.
The publication error comes just two months after the Chicago Sun-Times lost 20 percent of its staff through a buyout program. In March, the newspaper’s nonprofit owner, Chicago Public Media, announced that 30 Sun-Times employees — including 23 from the newsroom — had accepted buyout offers amid financial pressures. According to the Sun-Times‘ own reporting, this was “the most drastic the oft-imperiled Sun-Times has faced in several years.” Those leaving included columnists, editorial writers, and editors with decades of experience.
A copy of the Heat Index section, shared by Timothy Burke on Bluesky
Let’s connect the dots here. Media company cuts 20% of its staff, including experienced editors. Two months later, AI-generated nonsense makes it into print without anyone catching it. Are we really surprised?
This is the direct result of the continued hollowing out of the media industry. You can’t fire all your fact-checkers and editors and then act shocked when nobody catches glaring errors before publication. You can’t replace experienced journalists with AI and expect the same quality. And you certainly can’t expect overworked, underpaid freelancers to carefully vet every piece of content when they’re responsible for filling 64-page supplements basically on their own.
Buscaglia told 404 Media he did this as part of a “promotional special section” that wasn’t supposed to be targeted to any specific city. “It’s supposed to be generic and national,” he said. “We never get a list of where things ran.” That statement alone tells you everything you need to know about how little editorial oversight was involved in this process.
The part that really gets me is that this wasn’t complex investigative journalism. It was a summer reading list. If AI can’t get that right—and a human can’t be bothered to check if books actually exist before publishing—how can we trust these same systems and workflows for anything more substantial?
Of course, some will use this incident to declare that the sky is falling and blame AI for everything wrong with journalism. But that misses the point. AI is just a tool — it’s the continued corporate disinvestment in human journalists, editors, and fact-checkers that’s the real problem.
As one angry Reddit user put it: “As a subscriber, I am livid! What is the point of subscribing to a hard copy paper if they are just going to include AI slop too!?” The sentiment is understandable, but the anger is misdirected. The issue isn’t AI itself — it’s media companies thinking they can fire their staff and replace them with technology, without investing in the human oversight needed to make that technology useful rather than harmful.
This incident at the Sun-Times is just a preview of what’s coming as more media outlets cut staff while simultaneously pushing AI integration. We’re going to see more hallucinated books, more fabricated facts, and more erosion of trust.
What happened at the Sun-Times is embarrassing, but it’s also a warning. This is what happens when you strip newsrooms of the human expertise they need to function.
Maybe next time, someone will at least Google the books before publishing the list.
Words matter—especially when they’re being rewritten. In this sharp piece from Vanity Fair, Molly Jong-Fast examines how Donald Trump and his allies are weaponizing language itself—redefining terms, reshaping narratives, and even proposing new names for familiar landmarks. It’s not just political theater; it’s a calculated effort to control how we talk, think, and remember.
The administration’s attack on the AP, along with efforts to rewrite history and reframe reality, only reaffirms the maxim that language is power.
The right-wing war on all things “woke” has relied on a critical weapon: language. Trumpworld’s culture-war arsenal may contain many things—a flurry of social media posts and videos, an army of sympathetic media propagandists—but all of these tools rely on language.
It feels ironic to talk about the importance of language in MAGA’s rhetoric when Donald Trump uses so many malapropisms and shorthands to convey his ideas. Think of “the weave,” his tendency to tack back and forth between completely different, ancillary topics when speaking in public.
But while Trump may not be particularly careful about every word—or any word, really—his administration and allies are laser-focused on their intrinsic power. They’ve used phrases like “biological reality” and “maiming” to dispute transgender people’s existence and rail against gender reassignment surgery. They’ve disingenuously used words like “energy emergency” to ramp up offshore drilling. One of Trump’s early executive orders combatted nonexistent “censorship”—in actuality, a catchall term for any effort to combat the misinformation and disinformation propagated by Trump and his allies.
Now the Trump administration has barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One because the esteemed news agency will not follow the president’s executive order and refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” (According to Axios, this is just one of MAGA’s frustrations with the AP stylebook.) And the National Park Service, seemingly at the direction of Trump’s anti-“gender ideology” executive order, has deleted all mentions of “transgender” and “queer” people from the Stonewall National Monument’s websites—a Stalinesque erasure of the T and Q in LGBTQ, despite their crucial role in early queer-rights movements.
Trump and his allies understand the power of words, and his administration is quickly becoming one that’s obsessed with perverting their meaning. George Orwell reminded us of the political power of language in 1984 by using two different very complementary ideas—“newspeak” a euphemism for the heavily simplified language of propaganda, and “doublethink,” one example of which is “freedom is slavery,” a phrase similar to “arbeit macht frei,” translated to “work makes one free,” infamously used by Nazi Germany. Those concepts ring heavily in Trump’s executive order titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence And Readiness.” The name belies the fact that the order bans trans people from serving in the US military and prohibits the use of identification-based pronouns in the Department of Defense. How does banning trans people prioritize “excellence”? How does abolishing identification-based pronouns figure into “readiness”?
The Trump executive order abolishing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the military is called “Restoring America’s Fighting Force.” What exactly is being restored? Does a pre-1960s army somehow fight better than a post-1960s army? None of these questions actually matter to Trumpworld, because precision of language isn’t the point—it’s just overly simplistic propaganda.
And then there’s Trumpworld’s retaking the word “democracy” for their own purposes. Elon Musk told a Pennsylvania town hall crowd in October that the people “who say Trump is a threat to democracy are themselves a threat to democracy.” Musk spends a lot of time tweeting about democracy, but such posts seem to intentionally twist the meaning of the word to fit his own needs. For example, when a judge temporarily blocked his and Trump’s early actions, Musk tweeted last week that “Democracy in America is being destroyed by judicial coup. An activist judge is not a real judge.” Two days later, he tweeted, “If ANY judge ANYWHERE can stop EVERY Presidential action EVERYWHERE, we do NOT live in a democracy.” From a simple Twitter search of Musk’s username and the word “democracy,” it becomes evident that when the world’s richest man says something or someone is threatening democracy, he really just means it’s something he doesn’t like.
The Trump administration has also worked hard to replace our traditional political lexicon with contradictory doublethink. As Shawn McCreesh wrote in The New York Times, “An entire lexicon of progressive terminology nurtured by the last administration has been squelched.” Words like patriotism (see: “patriotic education”), freedom, and a favorite of the far right, “anti-American,” are frequently deployed in ways that mean their opposite. (The phrase “un-American” was a key buzzword of McCarthyism, a movement that just like Trumpism targeted intellectuals and academics, including my grandfather Howard Fast. The central premise was that communism was so profoundly corrosive that if communists were allowed to write movies or books or magazine articles, they could have Svengali-like influence over the reading public, forcing them to ditch capitalism. This administration seems to view “DEI” as a similar catchall for ideas they don’t like.)
Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote about Trumpworld’s dishonest relationship with words and phrases like “transparency” (while firing multiple inspectors general), “free speech” (despite the censorious nature of their edicts), and “deficit” (which Trump’s desired tax cuts would only increase). Kessler also noted how the Trump administration, including Musk’s DOGE, seems to call policies it doesn’t agree with “fraud,” when that is not what the word fraud means.
Even The Atlantic’s conservative columnist Thomas Chatterton Williams admits that Trumpworld is at war with the English language, utilizing the tools of censorship while somehow also claiming the mantle of free speech warriors. “Most of the banned words related to gender and diversity, and this time the rules had the force of the government behind them,” Williams wrote. “The compelled politesse of the left has been swapped out for the reflexive and gratuitous disrespect of the right.” This checks out when you compare the careful, halting, almost fearful language of many Democratic elected officials versus the strident, giddily hostile language of many Republicans.
But anyone who thinks Trump isn’t at war with language, with words and their meanings, should look no further than a world map. There’s reason to think that Trump’s “Gulf of America” name change is about more than just asserting American primacy in the region; it could also speak to his larger ambitions—his quest to rewrite parts of history. After all, Republicans have long been at war with history, trying to mute and soften the teaching of America’s original sin—slavery—and using book bans to prevent certain stories from being told.
It may seem odd that language has taken such a central role in an administration that seems so slapdash. But it makes sense. Trump ran an attack ad that used the line, “Kamala is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you.” It was, of course, misleading; prisons, under Trump, offered gender-affirming care, which the campaign was then criticizing Harris for supporting. But it didn’t matter because the language was effective. It was just a few words summing up Trump’s ethos by dumbing it down to: Other people are coming for your stuff.
