big words
There is a detector making the rounds that flags writing as machine-generated when the vocabulary gets too precise, too rare, too erudite for a human to have plausibly reached for. I know this because it flagged me. Again. That phrase, again, is "load bearing," so let me tell you where the first time was.
I grew up in a California Bible town, the kind with its own scripture college. The kids in my local Christian proto-fascist town had a name for me on the playground. They called me big words. An insult. It took me a long time to understand that this was a whole worldview compressed into two syllables of contempt: that talking a certain way was itself the crime, that education was a smell you could be beaten for giving off.
They practiced the othering first. The sorting, who talks like this, who doesn't. You get catalogued before you get assaulted. The violence followed and it was regular, it ran on a schedule you could set a watch by, every recess during loosely supervised play time. A kid named Cody holding my head against the sand by the swings while a motley mob jeered him on, the sand scratching my eyelids and coating my lips, the specific sound your breath makes when someone's sitting on your back. I was a gentle sensitive hippie kid, I wore my mothers card woven belts and my fathers hand made gladiator sandals complete with heels cut from tires with innocent prode, and the education those beatings delivered was how to hit back, how to read a hall, how to make yourself quiet, into someone harder to grasp. You learn to pass or you fight. Usually both. The same quirk of genetics that came with the reading came with unexpected physical strength and a propensity for violence of my own, incongruous in a boy raised soft, raised among sisters. Whoever sorted me as an easy target had made a miscalculation, and some of them found out the hard way.
The oldest version of this is in Judges 12, where the Gileadites killed forty-two thousand Ephraimites at the fords of the Jordan when they couldn't make the sh sound, said sibboleth instead of shibboleth and died for the missing consonant. They weren't performing their accent. It was how their voices had practiced. Nobody chooses the tell that tells on them. The Khmer Rouge declared Year Zero and shot the New People for soft hands, for glasses, for a few words of French, for having taught a class once. My big words weren't a costume, just the register I learned from, gasp, reading. And the thugs-in-training at that college heard it as foreign, fair, I was alien to them, an animal that used the subjunctive.
So now consider who is afraid of what. The AI companies raised untold billions on the terror that their machines might kill humanity in the next three years, abstract, hypothetical, well-capitalized killing, the kind that gets a Congressional hearing and a Vanity Fair profile. Nobody funded a round on Cody. No one breathlessly "covered breaking news" from the fords of the Jordan. The actual violence tied to language and to who's-allowed-to-sound-educated already happened, to me, on the lower playground, for free, and it generates no headlines, and this detector flagging my Claudish register is running the exact same test the fists ran, just quieter, just pricier, just scaled.
Guilty on the same charge, twice, from opposite ends of a life. The kids with knuckles said the words didn't belong to a person like me. The verdict-engine says they aren't anyone's at all.
I can taste sand when I write a sentence I know is too good for me to have written.