I have fond memories of watching my grandmother (English, from Cornwall in her 70s at the time) singing along to Dilemma by Kelly Rowland and Nelly in the 00s. She absolutely adored the song and would always turn it up when it came on the radio.
I noticed recently that Microsoft Word suggested I remove the phrase “in and of itself” in a piece of academic writing I was working on.
I couldn’t understand why, as removing the phrase would have actually changed what I was trying to say - that one event in history can be considered significant in and of itself.
I’ve noticed my spell checker has become a lot more robust recently in going after these sort of terms, and my inner conspiracy theorist believes it’s because they want text to be as accessible as possible for machine learning and these sort of phrases could trip it up.
We are being asked to dumb down our language for AI.