Men are getting more money (then) girls

[GoodTaste]

It appears to me that "then" as a typo of "than" is common in native English speakers since childhood. Correct me if I am incorrect.

What is confusing to me here is that this girl uses "men", rather than "boys" to match "girls", which seems odd to me. I wonder whether is a rehtoric peculiar to the girl, whether it is good or bad English, or whether it is common among young native speakers.

Source: From Joe Biden's tweet

 

[Barque]

It appears to me that "then" as a typo of "than" is common in native English speakers since childhood.

It happens sometimes. I wouldn't say it's common.

What is confusing to me here is that this girl uses "men", rather than "boys" to match "girls", which seems odd to me.

She's obviously a child! I don't think there's any point going into her choice of words, or her spelling for that matter. And it's much more common for women to be referred to as girls than it is for men to be referred to as boys.

 

[SoothingDave]

This is an obvious political fake, including common errors, to make it look authentic.

 

[dunchee]

It appears to me that "then" as a typo of "than" is common in native English speakers since childhood.

I don't know if it's "since childhood", but it is one of the common errors:

than / then | Common Errors in English Usage and More | Washington State University

brians.wsu.edu

 

[Glizdka]

Another common spelling mistake in this piece of writing is your instead of you're, and there's also presitent instead of president, right after the misused your.

I don't think there's any intentionality or conscious rhetorical aim behind choosing ladies and girls over women, or men over boys.

---

This is an obvious political fake, including common errors, to make it look authentic.

I don't know. It might be genuine. Children are fed political opinions by their parents and teachers. Wage gaps have been a hot topic for quite some time, so there's a chance Charlotte was tasked to write this as an assignment or something, and it somehow actually reached Biden, who used it to push his political agenda.

Has anyone verified the authenticity of this letter?

 

[Tarheel]

I agree with @SoothingDave. It is a fake letter to give whoever it was (allegedly Biden) a chance to say that. (This could rapidly devolve into a political discussion.)

 

[SoothingDave]

Another common spelling mistake in this piece of writing is your instead of you're, and there's also presitent instead of president, right after the misused your.

I don't think there's any intentionality or conscious rhetorical aim behind choosing ladies and girls over women, or men over boys.

---

I don't know. It might be genuine. Children are fed political opinions by their parents and teachers. Wage gaps have been a hot topic for quite some time, so there's a chance Charlotte was tasked to write this as an assignment or something, and it somehow actually reached Biden, who used it to push his political agenda.

Has anyone verified the authenticity of this letter?

Oh, sure. But still a political stunt.

 

[jutfrank]

Definitely a political stunt so it doesn't really matter whether it's fake.

As an ESL teacher, I'm looking at the transitive use of tell (I just wanted to tell something) and the inaccurate use of even (Even I'm a child) and thinking that these errors have the hallmarks of non-native speech. Do members think these particular two mistakes are characteristic of native-speaking children? Could it have been written by AI?

 

[emsr2d2]

Just to play devil's advocate here - it could theoretically have been written by a young child. Obviously an adult would have taken some part in it, even if it was just telling the child that men commonly earn more than women and that's not fair. Once the child was armed with that information (and encouraged to write to the president about it), they could, if left to their own devices, have written a letter like that. Most four-year-olds aren't known for their perfect spelling or grammar.

 

[Glizdka]

As an ESL teacher, I'm looking at the transitive use of tell (I just wanted to tell something) and the inaccurate use of even (Even I'm a child) and thinking that these errors have the hallmarks of non-native speech. Do members think these particular two mistakes are characteristic of native-speaking children? Could it have been written by AI?

GPT4 has just been released as a premium version of Open Ai's chatbot. Its English is impressive, and it's often better than mine. It amazes me how eloquent and erudite it sounds.

GPT3.5 made very occasional grammatical errors, and it sometimes hallucinated an answer that it presented very convincingly. I haven't talked to GPT4 enough yet, but so far it's been like talking to a native speaker.

I think it's possible that a large language model has written a letter such as this one, if fed the adequate corpus to learn from and prompted the right input that would lead to a specific narration.

 

[Tarheel]

"Even I'm a child" doesn't seem natural at all.

 

[emsr2d2]

"Even I'm a child" doesn't seem natural at all.

It's incorrect but would you really expect a four-year-old to know that?

 

[5jj]

I wouldn't expect many four-year-olds to be able to write a letter like that.

 

[Tarheel]

It's incorrect but would you really expect a four-year-old to know that?

I wouldn't expect a four-year-old to write that letter at all. In fact, I don't think that happened.

 

[Barque]

Why do some of you think she's four years old, specifically? The letter doesn't mention her age and neither does the tweet.

 

[emsr2d2]

Why do some of you think she's four years old, specifically? The letter doesn't mention her age and neither does the tweet.

Although the age isn't mentioned in the tweet in the link in post #1, the majority of the other news stories I've seen about it claim that Biden received the letter from a four-year-old.