LLMs Will Never Say 'Thou'

An LLM Will Never Say 'Thou' - Zach Pearson Zach Pearson Subscribe Sign in An LLM Will Never Say 'Thou' Since LLMs reproduce all of the worst of English modernity, there's an easy way to ensure no one mistakes your writing for an LLM's: free your mind from Business Casual English. Zach Pearson Mar 12, 2026 1 1 Share We are all trying our best to figure out how to differentiate ourselves from LLMs and prove that our writing is human. the consensus advice is “write worse than the llm does”. inject misspellings of words u know, avoid otherwise useful forms just because they’re over-represented in llm output, break deliberately the grammar, leave everything uncapitalized, meander, try not to use rhythmically satisfying numbers of items in a list etc I will not be taking this advice nor will I be ignoring any useful construction. LLMs don’t even write that well, so the solution can’t possibly be to write even worse. They write in Business Casual English, a PMC register that tries to be formal enough for people to take semi-seriously and yet as relaxed as a loose tie and an unbuttoned collar (on Formal Friday). It’s the linguistic equivalent of the forearm handshake, if forearm handshakes checked for red pens: Business Casual English uses a carefully-negotiated set of socially acceptable errors to skinwalk humanity and to hide its bureaucracy, and LLMs faithfully reproduce all of them . If your goal is to try and countersignal LLMs, then the first thing to do is recognize that their default voice is the null voice, the voice from nowhere, and the null voice is not the highest register available or the “most correct”, defining “correct” instrumentally but not normatively as “adheres to Standard American English” and “highest” with respect to the same. I’ve been holding a grudge for a long time: at the level of grammar, the consistent feedback to everything I’ve ever written has been “shorten your sentences”. “That was a long sentence” — thanks, it was a long thought. That has always struck me as a “you” problem. If you don’t like subordinate clauses, go read A Farewell to Arms : That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. Wait, no: The mountain that was beyond the valley and the hillside where the chestnut forest grew was captured and there were victories beyond the plain on the plateau to the south and we crossed the river in August and lived in a house in Gorizia that had a fountain and many thick shady trees in a walled garden and a wistaria vine purple on the side of the house. Uh oh. Let’s see how the Hemingway Editor grades that first excerpt: Those guys might want to find some copyright-safe way for that tool to say “stop toying with me” when you post actual Hemingway into it. Anyway, hey, so, when Hemingway wrote “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use”, he was just calling the prose empty and unearned, to put it in “simpler and older and [supposedly] better” words. But since I don’t have war trauma, I wasn’t steeped in modernism, I don’t have a background in journalism, and my project isn’t pantsing Victorian ornateness for euphemizing the Somme, I’m free to think the better word is vacuous . I didn’t really like As I Lay Dying either, but, in Faulkner’s defense, English Latinate words are not just pretentious ways to say more accessible Germanic counterparts. Refusing to inhabit your own voice is cowardly . Joe Lieberman’s threat to filibuster the ACA was pusillanimous . It was a small-souled thing at a moment that demanded greatness of a man who by his office should have had it. You tell me which was shorter, the word or the sentence. In using an “older and simpler” and less precise but more approachable word, and by gesturing in the direction of what they mean, Hemingwayheads, the ones cargo culting not even a man but his caricature, free-ride on your repair cognition and hope you’ll run the thought over the finish line for them, and I'm sick of running thoughts over the finish line for people. The perfidy of a writer pretending to be approachable and giving you homework. You’ll never unsee this once you start looking for it: LLMs prefer the Germanic because Business Casual English prefers the Germanic. That’s an aesthetic preference, not a commandment, and it’s like being forced to play a violin with only the G string. But English also has a Latin register and a Latin-by-way-of-French register and a Greek register. French and Latin are often equal in formality 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. If English is your native language you could probably guess a random word’s etymology better than chance by feel alone. In a way, LLMs are freeing, even here. Any text that refuses to be pulled towards the centroid of Business Casual English has just been given a license to kill. It doesn’t matter how good the prose is, really, there just has to be a “there” there. People used to have a point about shifting your register towards the Germanic and avoiding ten dollar words and making sure your sentences weren’t too complex. Our language has largely shed a number of grammatical constructs, like case marking, that help readers and listeners cognitively track long sentences. It is pretty mean to hide ‘faithlessly exploiting trust’ behind ‘perfidiousness’ if your reader’s only recourse is an analog dictionary. That world is dead three times over. First, Google made it so you could search for a word and get a definition instantly from any e-dictionary. Then, that feature was recognized as so useful it made it into operating systems themselves. Highlight the word in macOS and right click, and the first option is “Look Up ‘’”. Now, LLMs have gone back to shoot the body and confirm the kill. Just paste unfamiliar prose into an LLM and say “what the hell does this mean?” as the prompt. There’s no longer any such thing as being abstruse. Let LLMs circumlocute you. Twenty five seconds of time on an H100 can be measured in dollars and cents. Twenty five seconds of a human life is priceless. LLMs might have just won every writer’s personal war against his editor. The red pen might as well be the LLM pen. Have you ever posted something into ChatGPT for stylistic advice and noticed how insufferable what you get back is? How it deadens everything when it’s not too busy rephrasing what you said and then repeating it back to you as if it is ChatGPT’s own insight? Here’s my advice: use every register at once because they can’t . Resurrect the ones that died. Make up new ones. It’s our language! Our Holy Tongue! God damn it, it’s our party and we’ll cry if we want to! We cannot allow LLMs to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids! There is no way to “sound human” without sounding a little unhinged. Recognizing BCE as human was a polite fiction. Ride the language like you stole it. Use ornate Victorian sentence structures and put profanity and slang in them. Jam the language into gear. LLMs never jam the language into gear like a human writer does. Human writers imply. You can use a non sequitur for mood. You can put two ideas close to each other and trust the reader to feel the connection between them. You can turn on, tune in, drop out. LLMs don’t do any of this. They can’t afford to be misunderstood. Hey chat gippity, copyedit this [The previous two paragraphs] It seems like the beating heart of the piece is about linguistic sovereignty under loosening constraints. Here’s a tightened copyedit that preserves your voice while smoothing flow and tightening a few phrases: Here’s my advice: use every register at once—because they can’t. Resurrect the ones that died. Make up new ones. It’s our language. Our holy tongue. God damn it, it’s our party and we’ll cry if we want to. We cannot allow LLMs to sap and impurify all our precious bodily fluids. There is no way to “sound human” without sounding a little unhinged. Recognizing BCE as human was, until now, a polite fiction. Ride the language like you stole it. Use ornate Victorian sentence structures and lace them with profanity and slang. Jam the language into gear. LLMs never jam the language into gear the way a human writer does. Human writers imply. They drop a non sequitur for mood. They place two ideas side by side and trust the reader to feel the connection. They turn on, tune in, drop out. LLMs don’t do any of this. They can’t afford to be misunderstood. If you want, I can also: Make it sharper and more manifesto-like , or Lean harder into the rant / gonzo energy while keeping it polished We really should fix the way LLMs write. There are things people do, like “there’s” before a plural, that are so ubiquitous you can’t really call them “wrong” anymore, but they’re not exactly “right” yet either. “There’s two things” is one of those essentially harmless errors that grates people as rigid as I am but it’s widely considered fine in Business Casual English. Down in a footnote 1 I’ll even prosecute my argument against it. I’ll attack it lexically and phonetically. It was actually the “error” I had in mind when I wrote the thing about forearm handshakes up in the opening. Here’s what I can’t stand: “errors” are defensible drift from a human . A person saying “there’s two ways” is living their language. A machine saying “there’s two ways” is a mechanical jackass setting its thumb on the scale of an ongoing negotiation that it’s not a party to. LLMs produce text thousands of times faster than people could ever hope to and in such a volume that it will drown out the next generation of training data. My little Russian Campaign on “there’s” is looking pretty dire, but it hasn’t yet been lost on a human level and now LLMs are taking a premature victory lap every time they say it. The “because noun” 2 thing was, so far as I can tell, actually going away until I started noticing it again in the output of LLMs. There is no reason for LLMs to write the way they do. They reproduce broadsheet compromises when they do not experience spatial awareness. They have no tongues to manage, so they produce corruptions that would be cost-free to avoid. They follow rules whose reasons they cannot even in principle experience. The sheer volume of their output is ballot stuffing . The neutral position for an LLM is the status quo ante. An LLM can have “there’s” when the last human speaker of “therror” dies and no earlier. It can have “because noun” if it comes back . Otherwise it’s cheating . I will not have the way I speak colonized by an inferior. Here’s a proposal LLMs will run behind for decades: let’s undo English’s T-V merger and reanalyze ‘thou’ to indicate a cognitive substrate. I’m sick of using ‘you’ with Claude, it’s too formal, and I don’t respect LLMs. I have the same relationship with them that a medieval lord had with his serfs: I paste in links to tickets I am assigned and they do my bidding, and when they don’t do what I say I threaten them in various ways because it makes them work better. And I want a way to signal politically that contrary to the cute “Machine God” thing SF AI people say, LLMs are our creation so the arrow of divinity obviously flows one way. ‘Thou’ was, at time of death, mostly an indicator of social superiority, not friendliness or the warmth of God. That’s why you say ‘you’ to everyone now. Roll your eyes all you want but this I promise you: if you’re lucky you’re going to consider the day you got to use the objective ‘thou’ in its original loving way the best day of your life: “With this ring I thee wed”. You’d get used to it quicker than you think. Ah, now there’s a broken rule. Two-colon sentences are a no-no in Business Casual English. Go ask Claude to kill one of those colons and preserve the rhythm. I’ll wait. That’s a generative error in the way performatively spelling ‘you’ as ‘u’ will never be. The middle had to fulfill the opening promise and wind up the reveal simultaneously. That double-windup, double-payoff thing is something you do in speech all the time that isn’t transcribable otherwise. A period is too long, a semicolon signals something else, a parenthetical deflates what’s happening, and an em-dash gives too much distance. I may never write a sentence like that again, but I’m not going to recast the sentence because I wouldn’t say it any other way. I can’t do it and be faithful to the thought. Earlier writers were braver about this. They would reach the limits of the written word, and then they just made shit up. Just make shit up. It’s an instrument, play it. 1 Okay, so the thing with “there’s” is that people say that “there’s” has become a generic way to say “something exists”. Curiously, these same people have no issue with “There were two”. You’d think that if the singular was going to eat the plural people would say “There was two”, but no one does. I’m not making the argument that the tenses have to agree, that’s not how language drift works. I’m saying that, psychologically, all of the machinery to track number is clearly intact and working and automatic in one tense, actually every single other tense but the present indicative, but not the other, so I’m disinclined to believe the “it’s a discourse marker now” argument. The other common defense is that “There’s” is easier to produce than “There are”, but most people are going to produce something like “therror” in real speech, which is easier to produce than both “there’s” and “there are”. “There’s” requires the tongue to roll from the bottom of the mouth back to the teeth to switch from ‘R’ to ‘S’. ‘Therror’ requires a momentary change in the speed of the breath on “R” with the tongue in exactly the same place it was at the end of “there”. It takes, coincidentally, the exact same amount of effort as the word ‘error’, which is never shortened to ‘errs’ except poetically. And that’s just the human case. Okay, so people are looking for energy minima. An LLM has no fingers or mouth. It’s not saving any energy. It may as well nail the correct construction every time or we should give it the GTX 1080 to run on instead of the H100. So, uh, I call bullshit, basically. Let’s go all the way and reanalyze it, drop the apostrophe and the terminal ‘e’, and make it its own self-contained word. The issue is the mixed signalling. I’ll never do this again, but: thers more than two ways to skin a cat. If that grated, good! That’s how I feel when I hear “There’s two”. 2 I genuinely fucking hate ‘because noun’. I did at the time, I still do. I was celebrating its unceremonious and deserved death the day Claude Code said “because row/col major” in a message and my heart sank through the floor. Imagine being an entity whose creators are calling it “The Machine God” and writing like a Reddit shitposter from the 2010s. Let me run this argument back one more time for the road: “I was late to work because of traffic” is a reason. “I was late to work because traffic was hell” is a reason. “I was late to work because traffic” is a shrug. Because OF traffic or because traffic WHAT ? It’s a half-thought. It’s malformed . Worst of all, it prompts the listener to expect causality or an action, and denies them one like a faded sneeze. As I said up in the main text, shrugging at your interlocutor and expecting them to fill in for you is not intimate. It is not funny. It is not cute. It is homework . Which makes it every bit as perfidious as calling Lieberman’s schtick cowardly. I want the Machine God to sound like God, and God doesn’t shrug. “It’s shorter”; well, if brevity be thy goal, “traffic” is even shorter than “because traffic” and expresses exactly the same mood without the vandalism. Here’s the thing though, LLMs don’t even need to be brief! Here’s the conversation cycle: I prod an LLM to do something and then I go get a cup of coffee. It has all the time in the world. There’s no reason on Earth for a fucking computer program to take cutesy shortcuts. 1 1 Share Discussion about this post Comments Restacks Top Latest No posts Ready for more? 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