Theo Nash

Just making sure the historians don’t go getting any ideas…

- 'Classical period' does most of that work anyway
- We over-rate the Peloponnesian War thanks to Thucydides
- People would actually have to care about the period 404-338 BC

'etymology of soot' has quite a ring to it, reminiscent somehow of Hamlet's 'quintessence of dust'.

Like 'nest' not immediately obvious, but logical in a perfective sort of sense: 'something which has settled'

'sit' is, I believe, the only English word to preserve all of its original IE ablaut grades:

0: nest
e: set
long e: seat
o: sat
long o: soot

😬 good luck!

Strike it not, Banquo...

For philology qua philology, I am not convinced that this is a bad thing; but there is of course more to Classics than constituting a text.

I am reminded, reading this, of the anecdote about Shackleton Bailey refusing to attend a conference entitled 'What is Philology?' on the grounds that he would rather be doing it. To its practitioners, the project is so self-evident that introspection becomes heresy.

This would be the end of international PhD students in America: www.chronicle.com/newsletter/l...

Nice one! Very very hard to find at a reasonable price.

Rats In A Sack On the one hand, what’s happening in the University of Chicago – the (supposedly temporary) suspension of recruitment to PhD programmes in Classics as well as other disciplines that require s…

Chicago Classics as Rorschach blot, and ‘divide and rule’ in the 21st-century university.

thesphinxblog.com/2025/08/29/r...

The cynic in me says the exam will be back within three years.

• An Interview (on Zoom) with members of the Admissions and Fellowships Committee will be scheduled following the deadline for applications. The Committee's questions will be circulated in advance of the application deadline.

The American School of Classical Studies seems to have removed the traditional exam for the Regular Year, opting instead to interview students: www.ascsa.edu.gr/programs/reg...

genai.umich.edu/resources/st...

No: what it’s saying is that you have an ethical responsibility to improve yourself and society with the help of AI. It is disastrously written and they may not have intended these connections, but they are there in that prose.

I agree to an extent, but this is also the university’s official advice to students on the use of AI. An undergrad could reasonably cite it in a dispute with an instructor. At bare minimum it intolerably sloppy.

Except that the way they have said it explicitly links bettering yourself and society with the use of AI.

No, they’re saying that you have the potential to improve society by using GenAI, and have a responsibility to do so. They may have intended something else, but that’s what the sentence says.

It’s possible that they intended to say something closer to your interpretation. The difficulty is that they didn’t.

Well at least it’s obvious why you’re making apologies for it.

Except it does not say ‘you should be thoughtful about how you use GenAI’.

I do not believe that the final sentence can be read in that way.

But if AI can help you do that, does the responsibility not extend to the use of AI?

It’s a disaster, but the easiest interpretation is that you have an ethical responsibility to improve society with the use of AI.

(Under the Students section: genai.umich.edu/resources/st...)

There are more polite ways to ask: genai.umich.edu/resources

Sometimes, yes; but there is overlap, and in cases where both could be used you almost inevitably find a semicolon.

It is distressing but informative to read through the GenAI website. Things are much worse, I think, than anyone realised. The quoted passage was taken from the resources for students section.

genai.umich.edu

… by using AI. I don’t know why you want so badly to apologise for this dreck.