Almost 500 years ago, a group of English writers decided that Latin and French loanwords were corrupting the language. They wanted to replace them all with “pure English” alternatives.

If they’d succeeded, Hamlet would have wondered, “To be or not to be, that is the asking.” (“Question” comes from Latin “quaestio.”)

“Outrageous fortune”? No. Both words are French. He'd have raged against “unmeetly weird” instead.

Austen’s most famous sentence would come out: “It is a truth everywhere acknowledged, that a onefold man in ownership of good wealth must be in want of a wife.”

These purists coined “mooned” for “lunatic,” “fleshstrings” for “muscles,” and “endsay” for “conclusion.”

Some of these coinages were better than others (I don’t mind “mooned”), but, in the end, the purists lost. And English is probably richer for it. We have access to two layers of vocabulary: the Romance and Germanic. Most great English sentences use both.

This 16th-century controversy was brought on by a new technology: the printing press, which made it easy to flood English with Latin vocabulary.

Something similar is happening now with the backlash to the techniques used by AI writing. This new technology has flooded the world of writing with monotonous techniques: overuse of the em-dash, “it’s not X — it’s Y,” and, yes, listing things in threes.