Figure Skaters at the 2026 Winter Olympics Are Pushing the Limits of What's Possible For years, quad axel jumps seemed impossible. Then Ilia Malinin landed one in 2022. As he heads to the Milano Cortina Games everyone wants to know what's next. In 2021, famed Russian figure skating coach Alexei Mishin said that no figure skater would ever be able to successfully perform a quad axel in his lifetime. The following year, two-time Olympic gold medalist Yuzuru Hanyu was training to master the jump, but when he attempted it at the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, he fell short of finishing the four-and-a-half revolutions in the air. Mishin's pronouncement, it seemed, had been validated.

If I asked you to say which sentence was well-formed, you'd probably say the first sentence is and the second isn't. In linguistics, we would say that the first one is grammatical and the second one isn't. However, grammaticality is not always as simple as "this one works" and "this one doesn't work." In many cases, including my own BA thesis, people will be asked to rank the grammaticality of a sentence on a scale (in my research, I asked subjects to rate sentences on a scale from 1 to 7, which is relatively standard). The reason I bring up this concept of grammaticality is to highlight an important aspect of language, its ambiguity.