Online, no-one knows you are an AI.

Don’t trust anything ChatGPT tells you. It might well find nothing of relevance, panic and start making stuff up. Only, it will give you beautiful quotes, citations and references for the things it made up in a very polished and convincing way. The only snag is that it will all be meaningless or just plain wrong. Today’s AI cannot carry out the critical research required for your assignments (or research papers!) in the way you can. They are tools with a very specific purpose and asking them to do more than they were designed for – asking them to research or write your assignments, for instance – quickly exposes their limitations.

Does vulgar language on television make leave you clutching your pearls? Have you longed for family entertainment where a friendly censor has snuffed out the naughty words people use? Are you still living in the past century? Good news! The Television Guardian is here to protect and serve. By decoding the captioning encoded in the television signal ahead of when it is played as audio, the Television Guardian would mute the sound before it got to the objectionable language and replace it with an altogether more acceptable alternative on-screen caption.

And the word of 2019 is… “climate emergency”.  Well, we could have sworn that was two words but we’re not going to argue with the lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary!  Accompanying heightened awareness of climate change and its impact …

“Climate emergency” is OED word of the year in 2019 Read more »

Language evolves and dictionaries with it – we can only wonder what changes in the meaning of common, everyday words we might find were we to crack open the carefully preserved dictionaries hiding in the Rare Books room. If you …

Swipe right for a year of English language evolution Read more »

Good news for all our budding Arts and Humanities scholars!  JSTOR have just produced a series of subject guides to help you get the most from their resources, including: Books Art & Art History resources Language & Literature resources Political Science resources Education …

JSTOR: a guided journey Read more »

Oxford Dictionaries announced the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji as their Word of the Year 2015.  You can find out why, see the shortlisted words which didn’t quite make the cut, and watch their “Emojis in real life” video on the Oxford …

Oxford Dictionaries word of the Year 2015… is an emoji! Read more »