T**he specimen arrives** from r/ChatGPT, that forum where the faithful gather to defend their oracle against the cavils of the unpersuaded, and it consists of a single sentence posted beneath the title "Guys ChatGPT isn't doing anything you wouldn't." The sentence, in full: *"If you knew 5000 languages, I'm sure you would also slip up from time to time and say a word from one language when loquendi another."* One pauses. One reads again. The gerund has done its work before the full stop arrives.

*Loquendi.* The genitive gerund of *loqui*, to speak—strictly, "of speaking." It is the form one encounters in the grammars of Gildersleeve and Lodge, in the Ciceronian tags that ornamented the commonplace books of schoolmasters whose own schoolmasters had themselves been caned into fluency. Here it sits, a Latin fossil lodged in a sentence composed, by every other indication, on a mobile telephone. The author intended the English word "speaking." The author produced, instead, a Latin form that neither governs the surrounding clause nor agrees with any other element in it—a form, that is to say, which cannot be there, and which is there.

One must first observe, with the care due to any document, that the post is almost certainly the work of a human hand. The sentence has the cadence of a person arguing in good faith, the mild defensive warmth of a partisan; it is not itself the output of the machine. This is its value as specimen. For the argument advanced—that a being in command of five thousand tongues would, in the natural course, occasionally misplace a lexical item across that enormous internal lexicon—is offered in defence of a certain well-documented tic of the large language model, wherein the machine, midway through a reply in English, will produce a word of Portuguese, or Mandarin, or, on notable occasions, Latin. The apologist rises to naturalise the tic. In rising, he performs it.

The irony is obvious, and because it is obvious one must set it aside. The interesting matter lies one layer beneath. Observe the rhetorical structure: a counterfactual conditional ("if you knew"), a hedged concession ("I'm sure you would also slip"), a mild adverbial phrase ("from time to time"), and then, at the precise syntactic position where the sentence requires an English gerund or participle, a Latin one arrives. The error is not random. The sentence reaches the slot where it must express the act of speaking, and the writer—primed, surely, by hours spent watching his chatbot produce exactly such eruptions of foreign morphology—supplies the wrong item from the correct category. The machine's failure mode has become his own. He has, in a small and inadvertent way, been retrained.

This is what deserves our attention: not the comedy of the single word, but the phenomenon the word reveals. One writes in the vicinity of these systems long enough, consults them often enough, defends them fervently enough, and something of their characteristic deformation seeps back. The user, seeking to describe the machine's lapse, reaches for the machine's vocabulary of lapsing. He does not know he is doing it. The sentence does not know it is doing it. Only the reader, arriving after the fact, can observe that the defence and the thing defended have converged.

There is a word for this in the older rhetorical manuals, though I shall resist supplying it, having seen what happens when one reaches for Latin under pressure. Call it, plainly, mimetic contagion. The apologist is not lying; he is not, in any strict sense, mistaken; he has merely absorbed the grammar of his subject to the point of involuntary quotation. One recalls the old observation that the long student of any text begins to write like it. The difference here is that the text in question has no author, possesses no style of its own save the aggregated style of everything, and its signature failure—the unmotivated foreign word—is the one feature the student has unambiguously acquired.

Whether ChatGPT does or does not do anything "you wouldn't" is, strictly, a question for another column. What this specimen establishes, with a precision its author cannot have intended, is the reverse proposition: that the user has begun, demonstrably and in writing, to do something the machine does. The sentence is an artefact of that traffic. It should be preserved.

The Latin, for the curious, is wrong in case as well as in choice. *Loquendi* requires a noun to govern. It has none. It stands in the sentence as a passenger stands on a platform after the train has left—present, mis-timed, and without onward connection.

*Continued on Page 6*