Spell Checking a Year's Worth of Hacker News

2/20/2026 at 10:58:08 AM

"English being my second language, I curse it everyday and wish it could be more like, say, Hungarian, in which such a thing as a spelling bee would be unthinkable."

I love this about English! We are the most prolific word thieves of all time. We even stole an entire grammatically complete sentence from French ("Je ne sais quoi").

If you want English to be more like Hungarian, start inserting Hungarian words into sentences otherwise written in English and I guarantee people will adopt them as loanwords in short order. Never define them, we'll figure it out from context and vibes, and we'll never pronounce them correctly, which might make it grating to listen to them spoken back to you. But you can absolutely just incept words into English. We'll take them. We're hoarders. We all love that shit.

My favorite thing about it is the register system that developed from all this theft. There are at least three: German, French, and Latin. German is less formal, and French and Latin are often equal but differ in that French is less bureaucratic than Latin. The start, commencement, and initiation of something are different. And an initiation is different from an inauguration. You ask your friend, question a witness, and interrogate a suspect. Greek is more abstract than Latin. A moral question is nearer to the heart than an ethical question. You diagnose a disease, you judge a person. You have compassion, you merely feel sympathy.

Though, I would hate to learn it as a second language for the exact same reasons.

by zjp

2/20/2026 at 11:36:24 AM

> If you want English to be more like Hungarian, start inserting Hungarian words into sentences otherwise written in English

I've been doing something like this with Finnish (which is in the same language family as Hungary) - I use Finnish colloquialism but directly translated into English. Things like "going ass first up a tree" (meaning doing something in a sub-optimal way) or "better on the ground than in the devil's mouth" (when you spill something). I find it amusing.

The author is right though, the English language is dreadful; In Finnish the words are written and pronounced the same way. Try that with some names of cities or towns in England.

by theasisa

2/20/2026 at 9:01:07 PM

> "Try that with some names of cities or towns in England."

Are you suggesting it's not intuitively obvious that the town 'Towcester' should be pronounced the same as a "toaster" for toasting bread?

by swores

2/20/2026 at 6:20:45 PM

A lot of expressions in English started out as calques, outputs that process: you're paving the way!

by PollardsRho

2/20/2026 at 11:41:48 AM

Going ass first up a tree is funny enough to catch on if you keep using it. It fills a real semantic gap in the idea space of taking great pains to do something the wrong way. I'll never forget reading it just now.

Come on now though, dreadful. There's something beautiful about a language that's a fusion reactor for all other languages on Earth.

by zjp

2/20/2026 at 2:11:43 PM

I think a lot of what the author has an issue with is related to the Great Vowel Shift, not necessarily loanwords.

by IsTom

2/20/2026 at 1:39:05 PM

> I love this about English! We are the most prolific word thieves of all time.

It's impressive. English language: ~500,000 words. German language: ~135,000 words.

by xnx

2/20/2026 at 1:54:03 PM

Where do these numbers come from?

by Antibabelic

2/20/2026 at 2:31:46 PM

Multiple sources have those approximate numbers. Here's one: https://www.merriam-webster.com/help/faq-how-many-english-wo...

"Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, together with its 1993 Addenda Section, includes some 470,000 entries. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, reports that it includes a similar number."

by xnx

2/20/2026 at 4:16:53 PM

The way English uses this vast vocabulary is beautiful.

by kalterdev

2/20/2026 at 4:10:02 PM

> English being my second language, I curse it everyday

"every day"

Perhaps the author should check grammar while he checks spelling :D (Not the only issue I noticed, and I didn't read the entire article...)

by scoot

2/20/2026 at 11:03:37 AM

the zeitgeist hungers for loanwords

by webdevver

2/20/2026 at 10:39:05 AM

Seems like something that would be well received if one and exactly one guy was doing it, and annoying as hell when 35 additional jabronis started to run the same type of script, like what you see with the oh-so-helpful AI PRs on github that make random ass changes nobody asked for.

Especially given we already have pretty good spell checkers, and have had for way over a decade.

by marginalia_nu

2/20/2026 at 12:20:26 PM

Yes, and some of them can't even be turned off or made to ignore your variable names and acronyms...

by nottorp

2/20/2026 at 4:04:27 PM

> Before sending the first mails, I stopped for a moment to reassess whether this was a good idea. What ultimately helped me decide was whether I would like to get the mail as an author.

The only reason this is a reasonable thing for this person to do is this:

> since I ultimately manually check every error

Imagine these emails going out automatically, and incorrectly.

by pavel_lishin

2/20/2026 at 10:47:58 AM

Nice idea…but this will just end up in the same bucket as “I really like your website {domain} and especially your post {link to blog post} about {topic} would you like to include a link to {our service}” SEO link building spam.

by dewey

2/20/2026 at 10:35:25 AM

I dliberately put speelling mistakes to confirm I am not an AI.

by londons_explore

2/20/2026 at 11:17:25 AM

Is it otherwise that easy to confuse your writing with an LLM's? What if they deliberately start including spelling mistakes into slop pipelines, as the post points out?

by Antibabelic

2/20/2026 at 1:09:41 PM

Met a chap who wrote exactly like an AI all over reddit. Had 10k+ posts going back a decade, all in the same helpful style with em-dashes. Telephoned him to check he was a real person.

Turns out that certain really helpful reddit posters respond in exactly the same way AI companies wish their models would respond, and the RLHF process really reinforces their mannerisms despite being 0.00001% of the total training data.

I feel sorry for them - their recent post history is full of mods banning them for being a bot.

by londons_explore

2/20/2026 at 1:32:57 PM

Ouch. Yeah I imagine AI models get fed with proportionally more of their content, hence looks and reads like their style.

by 8cvor6j844qw_d6

2/20/2026 at 7:13:04 PM

I have had this experience.

My posts are link dense because citations are worth sharing.

It's really frustrating because they're half-assedly alleging in ignorance when I'm taking the time to do something more like actual research and sharing.

I don't want to assume it's an inadequacy or an inferiority self-soothing response.

Perhaps more troubling than AI replacing actual critical thought is "that's AI so it's bunk" replacing actual dissent and argumentation.

Someday I'll compare occasional archives of my outbound communications to see what's been flagged and censored for example "because that's AI".

by westurner

2/20/2026 at 12:26:22 PM

Gonna get the harvard email server onto gmail's naughty list going like this!

by QuadmasterXLII

2/20/2026 at 12:09:39 PM

>>The recipients of the mail campaign aren't passive in this story; on the contrary, some played a reverse card, informing of issues...

Yeah, this gets me. Grammar is grating to me and I used to call out when someone would write "Me and my friend..." only to get attacked in response as if grammar matters to no one.

by assimpleaspossi

2/20/2026 at 12:38:45 PM

It doesn’t though. If you think about it, improper English and slang strongly effects cultural and social bonding. I too would feel the opposite party is pretentious if someone is correcting me for a casual conversation. If it’s a professional relationship, that’s different.

by syntaxing

2/20/2026 at 5:19:41 PM

And so it begins.

by assimpleaspossi

2/20/2026 at 2:23:53 PM

[dead]

by isicjsjcu

2/20/2026 at 12:08:28 PM

Is it kind to email people telling them they wrote 'its' and not 'it's'? Thus used to be called being a grammar Nazi and is just a different kind of asshole

by xyzsparetimexyz

2/20/2026 at 12:20:51 PM

It's one thing when you're correcting someone you're in conversation with and a different thing entirely when you're correcting long-form material with at least some pretense for polish.

by Antibabelic

2/20/2026 at 12:41:29 PM

I don’t agree. Sending AI generated spam with spelling errors isn’t kind. Traditionally, humans ask to be edited and they deserve that agency.

by hluska

2/20/2026 at 1:05:33 PM

The person I'm responding to didn't say anything about AI. I don't agree that this kind of thing should be automated like in the OP either. However, as far as I'm concerned, notifying post authors about spelling and grammatical errors is normal and generally appreciated.

by Antibabelic

2/20/2026 at 4:06:16 PM

OP did mention they're manually verifying every found error, which is the only reason this is even remotely acceptable to do, imo.

by pavel_lishin

2/20/2026 at 2:30:00 PM

[dead]

by isicjsjcu

2/20/2026 at 1:42:22 PM

Do you understand the difference between these two words? I am asking genuinely, no offense

by efilife