The Outer Circle

Sitting in the right corner of the second double horseshoe of desks in the classroom, Rob stared in disbelief at the gradebook message on his mobile phone. A mere 63 for the assignment! “No, this won’t do,” Rob muttered. He had been fascinated by the city’s illustrious past as a member of the Hanseatic League and had spent the better part of the spring break collecting local history facts for the essay. He deserved more for his efforts. He stood up, straightened his blouse, and walked over to the teacher’s desk to have a word with Mr. Rogers.

“Master,” he began, “a 63. That can’t be right. All facts are true. Deventer had city rights from 1123 to 1851, granted by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, and so was entitled to collect taxes and create her own monetary system in the city-based governance system of the time. And it’s a Hanse city, as it was part of the prosperous mercantile system that spanned the Nordic and Baltic Seas.” That should do as opening argument, he hoped, and convinced he’d surely come up with more reasons adjusted to the teacher’s response.

#

Mr. Rogers raised his hairy eyebrows and just barely suppressed his reflex to grouch, even though he’d seen him coming, walking his gangly walk for the last 4 meters towards his desk. Those cocky argumentative learners whingeing for better marks invariably dampened the few pleasures of his teaching gig at the multi-denominational school a stone throw from the city’s vibrant Brink square. He gauged the learner standing on the right side of his teacher’s desk and opened his laptop to retrieve the summary notes he had made on each essay. ‘Rob Galema: great content, bad English’, had been his verdict.

“Rob, your essay’s content was fascinating indeed, and I even learned something from it, like the emperor having thrown a pope in jail without suffering any backlash whatsoever, but the essay topic was a means to an end. You’re expected to improve on your English writing skills. This is an English language class, not history.” He looked upward to the learner again, who leaned slightly to the left trying to take a peek onto his laptop screen. He grimaced his ‘this is non-negotiable’ stern face to dissuade Rob from continuing, but it did not register with him.

Mr. Rogers opened the file to substantiate the verdict with examples and turned his laptop. “Look at the red streaks,” he pointed out. “There: ‘severally’, ‘timeously’, ‘updation’, ‘send-forth’, ‘quafftide’, ‘snackwich’... They’re all made-up nonsense words! And the ‘bring beers with’ is a Germanism, not proper English grammar, not to mention mass noun versus count noun.” All that certainly should convince the lad.

Rob bent over to read the annotated file on Mr. Rogers’ laptop, turning from confident into confused. He then explained he had used the GraSp app for grammar and spelling checking, which had congratulated him on being 100% correct – there was neither a spelling mistake nor a grammar issue in his essay. True, he’d never heard of ‘severally’ either, but it had saved him two words in the word count – from ‘on several occasions’ – to help him get back to the limit of 1000 words and ‘quafftide’ was a concise noun for ‘the time or season for drinking’. The ‘send-forth’ had been the best suggestion to improve on the automatically calculated verbosity score: a noun to describe a celebration to mark a person’s – for his essay the merchant’s – departure to a place abroad that is perceived to have better prospects for success in one’s life, where the stay-at-home people wish the traveller good fortune, compared to a mere meek farewell get-together with mixed blessings at best. GraSp had proposed them all, so it had to be correct.

Rob stood firm again and it appeared he paused for effect, but nothing more was forthcoming. All counterarguments led back to GraSp, as if all roads lead to Rome.

Mr. Rogers, certain of his own right, pulled up the Oxford English app on his laptop and copied in ‘updation’. “Noun, Indian,” the entry stated next to its description. “See that? Not British English,” he retorted, self-satisfied. He copied in ‘severally’; “Noun, Nigerian” it stated. ‘Timeously’ turned up nothing. Gaining confidence, he opened the Cambridge dictionary, but joy was not to be had. It claimed that ‘timeously’ was Scottish and South African English for ‘in a timely manner’. He made a mental note to look into the quirky token, for surely it should have been ‘timeous’ or ‘timely’ rather than this chimera.

“But Master, they’re all Englishes!” Rob exclaimed. “The instructions never said it had to be British English.” He got his phone out of his pocket and opened the essay instructions and read them aloud, as if Mr. Rogers wouldn’t remember what he made the learners do: Schrijf een verslag in het Engels in maximaal 1000 woorden – write an essay in English in less than 1000 words – and so he had left the GraSp setting on the ‘any English’ option. Rob folded his arms when he made is closing his statement.

Mr. Rogers felt like he was being bludgeoned by a Neanderthal twit. He was the one with a PhD in English linguistics here and he shouldn’t have to argue with either a learner or a piece of software! Linguists ought to rule the world. Perhaps he should have ignored ridicule and anyhow registered to become a card-carrying member of the grammar police rather than having acquiesced to the LLM rage that took the world by storm four years ago with the headline-grabbing ChatGPT. He rubbed his stubble chin as distraction when a fleeting memory wanted to push through the fog curtain that he had pulled up to save himself from ruminating about whether he’d given up on the noble cause too quickly.

Pushing back against the guilt of having thrown the towel in the ring, he forced himself to think about the concrete issue in front of him. As a last resort, he opened OpenOffice Writer and copied and pasted the first page of Rob’s essay, including the sentence with the ‘beer’ mention. A red wriggle line appeared underneath the phrase, as it did for several other words. With a mixed sense of satisfaction, he showed it to Rob as evidence, somehow glad that the app agreed with him, albeit still at wits end and humiliated that the learner didn’t accept his expertise.

“Click on ‘Enable AI Assistant’ there, in the top-right corner, and you’ll see,” Rob said confidently, yet he ruffled his ash blond hair, apparently uncertain whether the OpenOffice AI assistant used the same LLM as his GraSp app.

Mr. Rogers did as suggested, and the red wriggle unceremoniously turned into a blue line. He frowned in disbelief and right-clicked the blue line to reveal the pop-up text box for the assistant’s explanation. The ‘bring … with’ was an acceptable Germanism due to the influence of Afrikaans on South African English. Clicking on the nearby blue-lined ‘etm.’ abbreviation, the software generously offered it got its credentials from the crowdsourced Urban Dictionary, abbreviating the Latin et merda ‘and shit’ – etc. with a vibe.

Mr. Rogers recoiled in horror. “This hodgepodge! What happened with the LLMs that these grammar and spelling tools like GraSp are built on?!” he gruffed at the laptop screen. As if OpenOffice’s AI assistant would talk back to him, a failed academic wasting his vast knowledge at a high school in a provincial formerly-a-city municipality. He’d signed one of the petitions for the class action suit by the Academics Anonymous against LLMs, but this called for the barricades. Purity of dialect ought to have been a minimum of standards. Frustrated, he closed his laptop, playing make-belief that its sleep mode would silence the issue.

Rob pulled Mr. Rogers’ thoughts back to the here and now and offered: “I think it’s thanks to the European decree for diversity in LLMs from last year, so that we won’t all be shoe-horned into American English.”

“Due to; not thanks to,” Mr. Rogers corrected in a reflex. “It’s ‘due to’ when it’s a negative cause and ‘thanks to’ when it’s positive.”

“Whatever... I used GraSp because it has the BalticS LLM behind it, both for the inclusivity and I thought it’s a cute name, since I wrote about the Hanseatic League.”

“A fitting abbreviation that LLM name makes!” Mr. Rogers spewed out. With renewed frustration, he opened his laptop again to check the AI Assistant’s settings. He clicked the ‘retrieval augmented generation’ tab, being all too familiar with its techniques to patch up the entertaining hubris those tools had outputted in their early days. It listed both all the 75 World Englishes and Kachru’s Three Circles of English. The software allowed a user to select either one.

“Do you want to be in the inner circle or the outer circle when searching for a job later on?” Mr. Rogers asked Rob. A snarky question, yet appealing to future success might just get the careerist learner in line to get this over with.

“Inner,” Rob responded without hesitation.

“Well then, for the next time, set it on either American, Anglophone Canadian, Australian, British, Irish, or New Zealand English. One English at a time... I’ll re-mark your essay this one time and refine the assignment description for successive ones,” Mr. Rogers caved in.

“Cool, thanks,” Rob replied with a big smile, and walked triumphantly back to his seat, mission accomplished.

Mr. Rogers covered his face with his hands, pretending hiding was a viable possibility, and missed seeing a change in Rob’s facial expression. He almost pined for organising a send-forth timeously, and to take Belgian beer with – wherever he’d relocate to and work on salvaging the languages and dialects in all their vibrant varieties, both offline and online. He gave the class an exercise to work on so that he could focus on his priorities.

He opened a browser and navigated to the lanling.biz jobs website, which showed multiple promising jobs, some of which were permanent thanks to the very same European decree on language diversity. Encouraged with the changing landscape of opportunities, he opened up the free version of ChatGPTen, and commenced crafting a prompt to assist the application process:

‘Write a cover letter for a postdoc or applied computational linguist position based on the following CV. In British English, modern (not urban), only the common loan words and assimilated words (exclude recent vocabulary from the former colonies), grammatically correct, formal writing style.’

He re-read all the qualifiers to ‘English’. Should he change the ‘formal writing style’ with ‘academic sociolect’, or add it? Technically, it’s a separate attribute, he corrected himself, and so he piled it onto the heap of features and constraints. And should he qualify ‘recent’ to the liberation struggles of the 1950s and 1960s? But ‘ombudsman’ got imported just 65 years ago, too, which approximated his grandparents’ age and therefore counted as sort of recent. He decided to let ChatGPTen figure out the fuzzy concept and hit the ‘enter’ key.

The app did not disappoint beyond the expected shortcomings. Rogers removed some verbosity and blandness that the tech bros hadn’t been able to resolve and then clicked on several ‘apply’ buttons on the lanling.biz job site that, no doubt, had an algorithm scanning his application. Looking forward to the replies that hopefully would report at least one match made in silico, he eagerly finished class, satisfied he had finally undertaken a possibly lasting constructive step towards linguistic diversity.

#

“That man!” Rob pointed to the monitor in the kitchen of the corps’ mansion for first-year history students in Utrecht. “Mr. Rogers, tsk!” he exclaimed to no-one in particular.

The talking heads of the 6 o’clock news were interviewing Mr. Rogers about the latest updates in European language models. The new LLMs now could handle both the standardised languages, Mr. Rogers explained, and at least two dialects per EU member state. For Dutch dialects, it included his beloved Broabants and, to the credit of his stint as school teacher, Dèmpters, spoken in Deventer, alongside his research passion, being Standard Irish English and Hiberno-English dialects.

Astonished, Rob went to sit up straight from his slouching position on the sofa. That man had made him feel miserable for the rest of the school year and thereafter, forever regretting the cost of the quest for a higher mark. As soon as he had sat down at his seat in the corner after their disagreement, the realisation that the resolution amounted to a Pyrrhic victory had percolated into his mind like the first fresh morning coffee from the filter coffee machine. He had traded a once-off higher mark for conformity, exclusivity, and disallowed more concise vocabulary in all future assignments.

“And so,” Mr Rogers edged towards his closing remarks of the interview as he looked straight into the camera, “to those who are in need of shortening an essay, I can warmly suggest cutting verbosity rightfully...” Mr. Rogers paused for effect and then rattled off a list of Irish words Rob had never heard of and couldn’t keep up with.

“For English,” Mr. Rogers began his final advice, still staring right into the camera as if he knew Rob was on the other side, “just make sure to select the ‘expanding circle’ option when using the LLM-based app, rather than ‘inner circle’, and select one dialect, lest your essay ends up banjaxed – ruined – and you act like a bucklepper – over-active and overconfident – defending it...”

As a smiling Mr. Rogers faded from the screen to bring the presenters back in view, Rob grinned, realising that his old teacher must have felt even more double-plus miserable from his antics, given that Rogers had changed careers because of it. Rob opened up the notes on his tablet, scrolled through his personal, ever-growing list of uncommon, obscure, overripe, or otherwise offbeat words, and granted banjaxed its deserving entry, squeezing it alphabetically, and aptly, between babeldom: state of noisy confusion and boyg: formless hindrances. He promised to himself that, one day, he’d write them all in one essay and get away with it – sans repercussion.