The Quibbler

He couldn't keep up with the grading. The papers multiplied like hamsters. So many were generated by ChatGPT and its ilk, he could tell after reading a single sentence that the remainder of the paper would be synthetic swill. Most citations were fictional. Title pages abounded, though the holy edict of The MLA Style Guide forbade them.

The conflation of homonyms was especially maddening: “Their are many reasons to take this argument seriously,” “Each has there own point of view,” “They’re work must be given its due.” He felt his nervous system rebelling. Anger frothed in his veins. He was curt, then overtly hostile, then cruel in his interactions with baristas and grocery clerks and convenience store snack jockeys. He understood the cycle: the grading made him angry; he was unpleasant to other humans; his guilt and self-loathing increased.

After all, he knew that his rage was misdirected. He hated the way others tortured language or treated texts he held sacred like trash. He castigated himself for letting that indignant lava splash the innocents in his orbit.

As he graded, he admired the red pencil that his father, long gone, had marked with in that hazy before time when comma splices and dangling modifiers were worthy of a stern, scarlet circling. The feelings of the author were nothing to his father compared to the beauty of the prose and the logical rigor of the argument.

He lifted exhausted hands from the keyboard and grasped the red pencil like a saintly relic.

It began to glow. It seemed to whisper deep in his battered, bitter brain: “Correct them!”

He circled a crumpled coffee cup on his desk. A ring of crimson energy formed in the air around it, and it vanished!

The Quibbler was born…