What Can’t ChatGPT Say?

LANGUAGE AS PLEASURE! LANGUAGE AS PLEASURE! LANGUAGE AS PLEASURE!

Hey all! Long time no see. PeeGee¹ and I have been working on getting our students vs AI novel in order, and we might just hit the self-publish button because querying agents is SO boring. LMK if you’d read it, perhaps even serialized in this newsletter? Poll below!

In the meantime, I want to share a talk I gave at the recent Civics of Technology conference² that hosted two days of inspiring conversations on ethical approaches to tech, especially in educational spaces. And then there was also me, yammering on about the magical powers of language we shouldn’t forget while AI descends upon our writing surfaces. Yes, I am your deranged, empath aunt and your ALL CAPS, OUTRAGED grandfather combined into one relentless, typing monkey possessed by the ghosts of the NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE! And I want to make sure that you, dear reader, don’t forget the CRAZY and TRANSFORMATIVE things you can to do YOUR BODY, YOUR MIND, and YOUR WORLD with just plain ol’ words! Because I forget. Every day. And I don’t think anyone should.

So! I’ll be sharing more about three magical powers of language over the next few newsletters, with literary and scientific sources to back up my wild claims. And I will start right here, right now, with the extraordinary power of LANGUAGE AS PLEASURE! Shiver, tingle, bing bang! Yes! LANGUAGE AS SOMETHING THAT MAKES YOUR BODY REACT IN WEIRD WAYS, EVEN NEUROSCIENCE SAYS SO!

OH! But before we dive in, here’s that poll about serializing my novel The Education of PureGenius. PeeGee really wants me to let him out of the box, and so is eager to hear your thoughts. DO NOT PROCEED TO THE TALK UNLESS YOU FILL OUT THE POLL. DO NOT PASS GO. DO NOT COLLECT $200. jk jk do what you want, you newsletter rebel!

Alrighty. Here’s the talk.

Language As Pleasure

Let’s start with the em dash. That glorious horizontal eyelash connecting two sentence fragments when the brain is too tired to figure out a more sophisticated solution.³ I use the em dash profusely because my brain spilled coffee on its grammar documentation years ago, and was born tired. I also use the em dash incorrectly, because a double hyphen “- - “ is way easier to type than whatever triple-finger witchery is required to type the em dash. Also I never remember if they should or should not have spaces on either side, neither option ever looks right.

But it's a hot spot, spicy topic—the em dash—along with a whole fruit basket of other alleged indicators of AI-generated text. Right? Online, you’ve probably seen posts about what textual markers are DEAD GIVEAWAYS THAT YOU ARE USING A ROBOT TO WRITE, YOU SHAMEFUL COMPLICIT HUMAN. And then, a little later, you may have also seen all posts that are like, I HAVE BEEN USING THE EM DASH LIKE A GD CHAMP SINCE I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD AND AM SUING OPENAI FOR TRAINING ON MY METICULOUS GRAMMATICAL USAGE. I love how Hegelian the social media waves are, don’t you?

Anyway, it’s a fun exchange, at least for what counts as fun at my family gatherings. But I actually don't think these jousts are just about em dashes or even the authenticity of human-generated(?) writing. I think they're a stand-in for a deeper concern that something sacred about language is at risk. We’re just not sure exactly what that sacred something is.

Today, I want to try to grapple with this mysterious, threatened dimension of language. To try to name it. So that we can preserve it. Exercise it. Use it. To be clear, this is not an anti-AI talk. Practically speaking, I find AI can be very useful in certain cases. I just think we need stronger forms of community and democratic oversight—so we can have real agency over the broader ethical issues this conference brings to light. Such as student surveillance, as Ian Linkletter discussed in his presentation.

What I’m focusing on in this talk are dimensions of language often overlooked in everyday discourse, yet deeply relevant to all of us. These are qualities more commonly explored by poets and philosophers—but I believe we can feel them, even if we don’t always have the words to name them.

There's a quote by the poet Adrienne Rich that I've always loved.

You must write and read as if your life depended on it.

You must write and read as if your life depended on it. I’ve loved this quote because I believe it entirely, and yet, I could not, for the life of me, defend it in court. It’s almost a ridiculous thing to say. What kind of reading and writing could be so important that your life might actually depend on it?

Let me give it a shot. Today I’m going to describe three different powers language offers that I think are essential for living full, empowered, and meaningful lives. These powers are pleasure, perception, and transformation. Let's talk about what these are, why they're important, and how we might make sure that we keep them in our practice as AI keeps breathing down our necks and grabbing at our pens.

---

PART I: Language as Pleasure

Don’t read this. Say it. Out loud. Move your lips, ok?

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
A pack of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked.
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

How did that feel? Hopefully, it was at least a little bit fun.

And to enjoy it, you don’t really need to know what it means. The point is entertainment. It's pleasure. It's the feel of the words in your mouth. It's the cognitive and physical delight of the rhymes, rather than the transaction of information. It draws us in for reasons aside from its semantic meaning. This is what I am calling language as pleasure.

Of course, in many spheres of our life, we filter out this mode of using language because it's unprofessional, it's too silly, it's too personal, it's inefficient. We prioritize the use of language as an information tool, because information is one of the key pillars of our economy. The personal, the playful, the pleasurable—those uses of language—we almost see them as childlike. And lo and behold, where might we see the pleasurable use of language the most?

Children’s books!

Can anyone guess which one this is?

In the great green room,
there is a telephone
and a red balloon
and a picture of a cow jumping over the moon.

That’s from the children’s classic Goodnight Moon. Its language delights in a quiet way. It sets a mood, it sets a vibe, a sort of soothing peacefulness that has nothing to do with red balloons or cows jumping over the moon.

But there’s something there—something that can move us, if we truly attend to it. If we don’t just scan it for information, where its purpose would be lost.

Poetry too, of course. Poetry is obsessed with leveraging the non-semantic capacities of language to draw listeners in. Poets love sound, they love rhythm, they love unexpected metaphors, they love messing with your brain. Think of the famous opening lines of T.S. Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.

Say those lines out loud. Like you are 13-year-old, overly-dramatic, aspiring thespian. Or find any poem and just read it out loud. Say it with your breath and feel it moving through your body. It's an extraordinary experience.

Protest too. That's another space where we see this pleasurable dimension of language, particularly in terms of using sound and rhythm for energizing and unifying a crowd. If you've walked into a protest and chanted, you've probably experienced that overwhelming feeling of merging with collective energy.

Like this chant, for example:

Whose streets?
Our streets!

There's a beat, there's a rhythm, and it calls to you.

Speeches, too, sometimes pull on the pleasurable powers of language. Think of Martin Luther King's famous lines:

I have a dream
that one day this nation will rise up
and live out the true meaning of its creed...

He’s conveying information, yes—but he’s also drawing on literary cadence, metaphor, and a rich set of rhetorical tools to inspire and energize his listeners.

Online, too. Look at your text messages. Look on internet forums. Someone is probably yelling yas queen or smashing the keyboard or spelling words in ridiculous ways. Here again, we see the pleasure of language in full swing.

I could go on, of course, but the point is that all of these examples use language in ways that go beyond mere information transfer. They work through a mix of breath, rhythm, metaphor, allusion, surprising juxtapositions, rhyme, and the sheer sound of words to us in at a deeper, more embodied level.

This is a well-recognized phenomenon—that language can create bodily and cognitive pleasure.

The literary critic Roland Barthes, for example, wrote an entire book about the cognitive form of literary pleasure. He describes it as a deep ecstatic pleasure that comes from a text’s disruptive and unsettling qualities. For him, meaning was most alive when it resisted interpretation or closure, when it just sort of left your brain tingling and going, what?

Neuroscience is increasingly supporting the idea that language can evoke both bodily and cognitive forms of pleasure. Studies show that poetry activates regions of the brain associated with food and romantic love, particularly when the language is puzzling or unexpected. Remarkably, people can even experience physical shivers while listening to poetry, even if they don’t consider themselves fans.

It also works the other way. Studies suggest that rhythm and cadence are closely tied to emotional expression—when people speak about something personal, their language often takes on a natural, almost poetic rhythm without conscious intent.

The pleasurable dimension of language is something we appear to be hardwired to respond to—whether we’re consciously aware of it or not.

Why does this matter? I bring it up because this dimension of language is profoundly nourishing. It’s restorative. It’s soothing. I think it can bring people together. I think it can help us overcome individual and collective forms of despair that nothing else can.

And we're at a moment when we really need those resources.

What I worry about is that the more we shift towards AI-generated—which prioritizes speed, disembodiment, and abstraction—we lose the attention and incentive needed to create and engage with forms of language that ask us to slow down and inhabit them fully.

So, to conclude part one: we have this incredible power at our disposal and it’s zero dollars! But we need to exercise it. We need to make sure it doesn’t runaway with the dust bunnies of history! So go read a poem aloud like Sean Connery to his beloved goldfish. Conduct your Slack messages like Virginia Wolfe. Use onomatopoeia in work reports. Recite a limerick to the cashier. Notice your reaction to even thinking about doing such things. Are you terrified? Excited? Interesting! Now try it. I promise you, things will happen. So see what you can move with just words. Your boss’s eyebrows. Your afternoon lethargy. The maddening sadness of the world. Breathe into those letters and make those em dashes dance.

WHAT’S NEXT?

• PART II: Language As Perception

• PART III: Language As A Transformative Force

• I’m putting together some exercises for practicing these linguistic powers in your life. Let me know in the comments if you’d like me to share in a future newsletter!

For only ZERO CENTS, you can SUBSCRIBE to this newsletter and ensure more SuperCyberSplaining in your inbox!

Sources

Poetry / Literature

Arts of the Possible, 2001 — Adrienne Rich

The Pleasure of the Text, 1973 — Roland Barthes
https://archive.org/details/pleasureoftext0000bart

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 1915 — T.S. Eliot
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock

Goodnight Moon, 1947 — Margaret Wise Brown
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/goodnight-moon-margaret-wise-brown

Everything Is an Invitation, n.d. — David Whyte
https://resources.soundstrue.com/transcript/everything-is-an-invitation

Scientific Research

Exploring Poetry with Cognitive Neuroscience: T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, 2016 — Christina Wu
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354069675

Short- and Long-Term Effects of a Novel on Connectivity in the Brain, 2013 — Gregory S. Berns et al.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24245678/

How Speech is Recognized to Be Emotional - A Study Based on Information Decomposition, 2021 — Haoran Sun et al.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.12324

1. Oh, did you miss the newsletter where I accidentally turned my novel draft into an AI assistant that has broken into all of my digital devices and harasses me constantly?

2. This was the most badass group of people I’ve seen in one Zoom call in a long time. You can watch some of the recorded talks here: https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/2025conference. Many thanks to the organizers for hosting these important conversations, most of which were not silly habberdashery like mine!

3. Obviously, I am speaking only about my own motivations for using the em dash. You certainly only use them for their rightful, god-given purposes.