DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE:
How the BBC was captured by taking over the official style guide.
1. The problem. A full natural language grammar generates an enormous (often infinite) set of possible sentences.
2. Solution: refine it. By pruning sentence production rules (e.g., forbidding certain embeddings,…— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) May 17, 2026
”It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words…Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”