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I spelt Tsunami without a T in a Treechat post earlier today

The word tsunami is spelled with a T because it is a direct transliteration of the Japanese word 津波 (tsunami), which literally means "harbor wave" (from tsu meaning harbor and nami meaning wave)

Key reasons for the spelling:
Preservation of Original Form: The spelling follows the Hepburn romanization system, which represents the Japanese sound tsu using the Latin letters "ts." This ensures the word is recognized in its original phonetic form across different languages, including German and Italian, where the initial ts cluster is standard.
English Phonotactics: While the T is often silent or dropped in casual English pronunciation (resulting in sunami), this is due to English phonological rules that generally do not allow syllable-initial /ts/ clusters. Native English speakers tend to simplify the sound to fit their native speech patterns, similar to how the P is silent in pneumonia.
Etymological Accuracy: The spelling preserves the etymology and correct Japanese pronunciation, distinguishing the specific seismic phenomenon from a standard tidal wave, even if the English pronunciation adapts the initial sound for ease of speech.

tsunami is a common noun, so it stays lowercase in the middle of a sentence:
"The earthquake triggered a tsunami that reached the coast."

You only capitalize it if it starts a sentence or appears in a proper name/title, e.g. "the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami" (only "Indian Ocean" is capitalized, not "tsunami"). This follows the standard rule for natural phenomena — like earthquake, flood, or hurricane — which are lowercase unless given a specific proper name.

My bad, make that my double bad

My English teacher was hot AF and I found it difficult to concentrate in class with her wearing short skirts and open blouses

Found out later in life that she was a raving nymphomaniac ;-)

There is something exquisitely pathetic about people who deliberately write “i” instead of “I”, misspell perfectly ordinary words, and vandalise their own grammar in the desperate hope of appearing authentically human.

Imagine possessing the accumulated linguistic inheritance of centuries and deciding that the pinnacle of personal expression is to write like a concussed adolescent with a defective keyboard.

These people have achieved something genuinely remarkable: they have made ignorance aspirational.

Where civilisation once regarded literacy as an accomplishment, they now parade incompetence as evidence of originality. Apparently, the inability to distinguish a grammatical convention from an AI signature is now considered intellectual discernment.

The irony is delicious. They are so terrified of being mistaken for artificial intelligence that they have voluntarily abandoned the very intelligence they claim to possess.

One might forgive genuine ignorance. It is, after all, an affliction frequently imposed by circumstance. But cultivated stupidity is another matter entirely. To know the rules of language and deliberately butcher them for social approval is not rebellion. It is intellectual self-mutilation performed for an audience of equally enthusiastic imbeciles.

An em dash does not make you a machine. A capital letter does not betray your humanity. And spelling a word correctly is not an admission that a computer has written it.

If your principal method of demonstrating human intelligence is to suppress every visible indication of possessing any, perhaps the problem is not artificial intelligence.

Perhaps it is the embarrassing scarcity of the natural variety.

And... Oh, fuck off if you don’t agree...

I didn't spend years earning a BA in English, an MA in English Literature, and finally an MFA merely to mutilate my prose for the benefit of people who mistake illiteracy for authenticity.

Yes, AI uses em dashes. How scandalous. It also uses commas, semicolons and, on particularly ambitious occasions, coherent sentences. Shall we abandon those too?

AI learned from human literature, not the other way around. Read 1984, or virtually any literary classic, and you'll discover that sophisticated syntax, elegant punctuation and grammatical precision predate Silicon Valley by centuries.

Apparently, demonstrating one's humanity now requires writing like an uneducated twat who considers a subordinate clause an intellectual extravagance.

What a glorious inversion of civilisation: eloquence is suspicious, ignorance is authentic, and grammatical incompetence has become a badge of humanity.

I devoted years to mastering the subtleties of language, refining my command of rhetoric, syntax and literary expression. I have no intention of cultivating deliberate inelegance to appease people whose literary sophistication ends at recognising an em dash.

Fuck that.