Sophia Smith Galer

What’s in a name? For Popes, it’s meaning, and what they hope to achieve with their papacy. The language nerd and Catholic choirgirl in me got together today, and thought about what it meant for us to live in the time of the first ever Pope Francis. #popefrancis #language

The em dash. Hate it? Love it? Here’s why people are talking about it #emdash #language #ai

Babies only have a choice of surnames if their parents did too! Italy’s latest surname debate sparked some thoughts today 💡 #language #surnames

Why do we call Mona Lisa that names when everyone else calls her La Gioconda? #language #art #monalisa

Technically every Eurovision artist will be serving kant so why can’t Miriana? 🇲🇹 #language #maltese

The French language police want you to STOP SAYING ‘STREAMER’! 🚨 👮 🇫🇷 #language #french

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order making English the only official language of the US - a country previously unique for having no official language. It’s something the US has always been praised for and was in the tradition of its very multilingual founding fathers. Will you or people you work with be impacted by this change? If so I want to hear about it #language

I was horrified to see my first book, Losing It, in the dataset that The Atlantic revealed this week to have not only used pirated works, but which Meta have used to train their flagship AI model. I am in the middle of writing my second book, as well as building my own AI tool Sophina. So as you can imagine, I had a rant percolating. Here it is. Copyright theft is data abuse, and not simply the disregard for authors’ existing work; it’s disenfranchising all of us who equally have a right to consent, endorse and deny how our work might train AI tools in the future. I don’t think anyone wants a world with fewer authors in it. Horrific data practices like these doesn’t only mean that that will happen because we aren’t being paid fairly. It also means a world with fewer innovators in it, too.

being a big brave girl parlando in italiano #italian #language