Fine words butter no parsnips. A ludicrous phrase, though it’s true. Or real at least, listed in the Oxford and elsewhere. Maybe you’ve met the proverb before, hiding in a PG Wodehouse novel. Yet imagine you haven’t. What does it mean?

Fancy speech is all very well, perhaps, but it fails to deliver material benefits. Talk is cheap, in other words. Elegant waffle won’t moisten your greens. Facing fresh idiom, humans play this mental game, speculating what a lip-sticked pig connotes, a milkshake duck, a rat with a gold tooth.

Social media users have found that Google’s AI will find meaning in any phrase, no matter how false.Credit: Getty Images

We base our guesswork on kindred expressions or meld the idiom’s disparate ingredients into a cogent whole. Ethiopians say, “The smaller the lizard, the greater its hope of becoming a crocodile.” I don’t know the aphorism, but I reckon I could fumble my way towards an answer.

Google’s AI Overview thinks likewise. Rather than admit........

© The Sydney Morning Herald