"Can you ask someone to "close your eyes and watch" something? Just how private does a conversation need to be in order to upgrade from speaking "privately" to "very privately"? What does it mean for a wild pigeon to be "essentially on life support"? These are some of the many conceptual riddles posed by the contenders for Defector's annual prize for bizarre sentences in journalism. It's time to announce the 2025 Shams Charania Award For Excellence In Divulging Of Information Through Syntax Comprehended By Many."
"But this was a year where even relative Luddites began to outsource the act of writing to the machines wherever possible. I saw waterfalls of heavily spaced-out LinkedIn-ese. I heard of job applications composed by LLMs, then evaluated by LLMs. I knew autocompleted emails were ricocheting off other autocompleted emails, endlessly clattering into the void. I wondered if humans were removing ourselves from the loop."
"Even in an era where humans are supposedly ingesting and expelling a larger volume of text than ever before, it seems that we can hardly be bothered to sit down and compose much original language ourselves. That's why I'm grateful for the yearly ritual of the Shamsys, even the candidates that make me feel concussed after we read them aloud in our deliberations."
The Shams Charania Award spotlights bizarre and unclear sentences published in journalism, highlighting conceptual riddles about language and meaning. Examples include paradoxical commands, ambiguous privacy modifiers, and metaphors stretched to the point of puzzlement. The year featured both unexpectedly clumsy lines from ordinarily clear writers and deliberately opaque prose from habitual obscurantists. Simultaneously, the proliferation of AI tools altered composition practices, with machines drafting LinkedIn posts, job applications, and emails that then interacted with other automated outputs. The award ritual functions as a celebration of human idiosyncrasy amid growing automation of written language.
Read at Defector
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