Everybody knows.

It’s amazing just what we’re prepared to believe, isn’t it? Sometimes because everyone says it’s so. Sometimes because one trusted source tells us it’s so.

Recently I read that 10 percent of French citizens believe that the Earth is flat.

The best argument I’ve heard against this position is that if the Earth were flat, by now cats would have knocked everything off it. (Although in reality they would have knocked most things off it but hidden a few things under it “for later”.)

We believe that vultures prey on small children.

That governments know what they’re doing.

And that giving six-year-olds unrestricted access to the Internet is “A Good Thing”.

For years a small number of people actually believed that several black panthers roamed Dartmoor in the UK.*

There was once a restaurant that served “the best perch fillets in the whole of western Switzerland”. And so we would go there sometimes.

It was out of town, in a small village that we otherwise didn’t have much of a reason to go to. But for The Best Perch Fillets In The Whole Of Western Switzerland, it was worth the drive.

I was new to the appreciation of perch fillets. And honestly? The dish wasn’t really that good. But it was The Best. Everyone said so. Everybody knows.

And that was what mattered.

At some point, I don’t recall when or how, the truth came out. Someone almost certainly dared to ask a question. Maybe two. And we found that the chef who had been responsible for The Best Perch Fillets In The Whole Of Western Switzerland had left the restaurant years earlier (and was presumably preparing The Best Perch Fillets In The Whole Of Western Switzerland in some other restaurant).

And we stopped going to that restaurant. Because the dish really wasn’t worth the drive. And “Everyone” didn’t mention it again. The way they often do.

“Look! He ****s!”

It’s somewhere around 1990, and I’m standing in an art gallery in the middle of nowhere in southern Europe while a dapper young man in a suit so sharp you could cut glass with it explains an abstract work to me and the band, and the strange effect it is said to have on the viewer.

We’re here for a jazz festival. Part of the plan to reconstruct an entire region devastated by earthquakes. The thinking behind the plan seems to be as follows: When a great deal of disposable income is present, the fine arts thrive. So, if we bring in the fine arts, we will generate a great deal of disposable income. Personally, at this point in time I’m still trying to digest this idea.

The musos** are crowded around the painting, but I’ve moved back a way to better test its famed effects. And our host looks up, points at me, and exclaims: “Look! He ****s!”***

The band look at me. Of course, this statement may be true. It may, equally, not be true. But no one really cares if it’s true or not. What they’re all wondering is why our host would say it.

And then, sensing the discomfort, but interpreting it as confusion, he tries another tack: “See!” he shouts, laughing, “He is ****ing!”

Now, this clearly isn’t true.

Tactfully, the front man, Allen, asks our host what he understands by ****. “It means”, the young man says, “to move from side to side”.

And so, Allen tells him what **** really means.

And there are profuse, repeated apologies. Which are of course accepted.

Someone had told him that…

Someone he trusted.

"Let's pencil on Wednesday!"

Fast-forward 35 years or so and I’m working on a paper, and as we approach a final version my client comes back with: “I have to ask: my word processing software suggests…”.

So I explain why what the software is suggesting would be wrong, and comment that I’ve been using the very same software for almost 30 years and have never seen its grammar checker in a state worse than the one it has been in these last few years.

We didn’t have time then for me to give examples, but over the next few months I collected a few:

• When I ask it to check the passage, “It seems strange to charge more on the basis of having to actually do less”, the grammar checker proposes I change “having to” to “having too”.
• When I ask it to check the passage, “John Doe is Money Counting Specialist at Secretive Bank, acting as global lead on the topic since 2022”, the grammar checker proposes I write, “from 2022”.
• When I ask it to check the passage, “Let's pencil in Wednesday”, the grammar checker proposes we change this to “Let’s pencil on Wednesday”.
• The grammar checker proposes I change, “Only I drink coffee on Monday mornings” to “I only drink coffee on Monday mornings”. Even though the two sentences mean something entirely different.
• The grammar checker proposes I change “... as an MS Word file” to read, “… as a MS Word file”. Which is incorrect.
• When I ask it to check the passage, “The inclusion of other non-linear controls does reduce…”, the grammar checker proposes I change the passage to, “The inclusion of other non-linear controls do reduce…”.
• When I ask it to check a passage that includes a reference to a numerical mean, the grammar checker proposes I replace “mean” with “meaning”.
• The grammar checker doesn’t like passive voice. It doesn’t like passive voice so much that when I ask it to check the passage, “... the fixed effects are interacted with the same indicator...”, it proposes we replace “are interacted” with “interact”. Which is not the same thing at all.
• The grammar checker proposes I replace “control for” with “control”. Which is not the same thing at all.

In fact, the grammar checker tells me to make a lot of changes that radically change the meaning of grammatically problem free texts. Including systematically proposing that I delete modifiers. The authors may wish to say that something appears to be true. But the grammar checker,  which lives in a world without nuance, tells me that it’s either true or not.

But my current favorite is this: When I ask it to check a passage including the words, “… appears to be…”, the grammar checker proposes we change these words to read, “… appears to is…”.

Accept any of this “expert advice” and the result will be at best a text with a radically different meaning, at worst—drivel.

And the moral of this particular tale is?

Well, there are three:

Trust your taste buds over what you hear on the grapevine.

Remember that just because you’ve paid for a grammar-checking feature, that doesn’t mean that it actually works.

And always look words like **** up in a reputable dictionary.

* OK, this particular one did turn out to be true.

** I was actually surprised the find that “muso” merits an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. A 1960s term originating in Australia, it means musician, and is pronounced “myoozoh”. Or as the OED puts it—and this, in my experience at least, is more appropriate—it rhymes with ouzo.

*** I’ve chosen to blank the word out so as to protect the sensitive. And anyhow, the Internet is teeming with six-year-olds with smartphones, and there are some words that genuinely are unsuitable for young eyes and ears.

[Illustration: By Alexander Francis Lydon (1836-1917) - British fresh water fishes, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19420893, with thanks to Wikimedia.]