Letters to the Editor SpecGram Vol CXCII, No 1 Contents Bʀoᴋɛɴ Nɛws Nɛᴛwoʀᴋ

/nuz baɪts/

Not a wire news service but still more reliable than most newspapers.

Sarcasm Cured. Yippee.

Professors at the Institute of Alternative Linguistics, which does work that we totally respect, have announced that they now have a system for detecting and curing sarcasm. What a great idea.

Apparently, they take samples of your language and their NLP system tells them whether you’re being sarcastic. It is absolutely and completely accurate and doesn’t p-hack at all. We believe them.

To cure sarcasm, they ask you to shove your head in a tube, which makes sense to anyone thinking about it hard enough, and then alter the linguistic parts of your brain with utterly harmless gamma radiation. We’re not to compare that to any superhero origin stories. So we won’t.

The only side effects are a tendency to believe press releases and a passion for seeing the linguistics of English as a wide open scientific field. A small price to pay.

Letters to the Editor
Bʀoᴋɛɴ Nɛws Nɛᴛwoʀᴋ
SpecGram Vol CXCII, No 1 Contents