Still no comments on diaeresis? Hat trick! The first comment on three consecutive posts!
Sorry -- actually four consecutive posts.
Distressing? Really?
I'm not surprised or distressed by it - language is loaded stuff, for sure, so that's nothing new. I've just been pretty pleased that the discussion of the words and their significance has been largely intelligent, respectful and articulate. And with cock jokes!
Why, there's something for everyone!
Oh, and I caught a run-on in one of the diaresis comments.
It may distress you, but I don't really see any way around this problem: a language is made up of many idiolects, none of which is identical to any other, so there will always be slight nuances of expression that some people perceive and others don't. Also, language is learned, so that a shift in nuance can over time result in a major change in the language (recall Ben's examples in the other thread). This is happening constantly without anyone really noticing, unless you happen upon a discussion of the excruciating minutiae of meaning (which seems to occur rather often here).
Somehow I don't think they have erudite discussions like this on, say, Little Green Footballs.
I would damn near guarantee the existence of, though I don't have patience to look for, one commenter on LGF with the understanding of linguistics which an intelligent undergraduate student of linguistics has (That is a quasi-corollary of the claim (which I'm making right now) that being good at any particular discipline isn't much of an indicator of what ones political beliefs will be) . Also, the pre-9/11 posts on LGF are plenty interesting, which I think I learned from a post here prior to when Frederick was around.
I have repeatedly rewritten this comment to make more sense than it did; it still doesn't make much sense. I believe I need to go to sleep, and I believe that I have a serious claim here, along the lines of, "don't think that smart people have to be on your side," but it isn't quite that. Maybe I'll revive my blog to work it out.
"don't think that smart people have to be on your side"
This was my immediate response to Frederick's comment as well.
Just about every time we discuss what a word means--think of "earnest," "demurral," and "gay"--it quickly becomes clear that people are operating with wildly different understandings.
Why, I never heard such a thing. Couldn't people just buy dictionaries?
Ogged, a lot of people here experimented with drugs in their youth, and many of their brains have been reduced to Swiss cheese. (Sort of like the once-wholesome Brian Wilson, though not quite that bad). So I think that it would be wrong to expect too much in terms of clear thinking.
I'd be surprised by how surprised you are, except that I know lots of people have the same belief, that competent speakers of English are transparent to each other. Maybe I just argue more than most, but every time I have an argument (political, social, what-have-you) a fair amount of it is devoted to "No, that's not what I meant, you're missing my point," and it's usually honest on both sides. (Although it has a nasty tendency to lead to bad feelings among people who think that finding their position initially incomprehensible is either dishonest or an insult to their communication skills. This happens with lots of people -- I'm not thinking solely of any particular interlocutor.) Pretty much the only people I can argue with without close attention to the definition of terms are my nuclear family, and that means my birth family -- more than a decade with Mr. Breath doesn't mean we speak the same language.
Once you're talking about precise shades of meaning, idiolects vary wildly, and vary within a range where it's often not reasonable to call one more correct that the other. Recognizing that (that no one is understanding precisely what you mean most of the time, and if you need them to you're going to have to put in a lot of effort) is key to successfully communicating anything subtle.
I think that Ogged was baiting us, as per usual. After all, we're mostly talking about sociolinguistic nuances of the rather recently-popular word "gay", which is supposedly a non-pejorative substitute for a family of perjoratives, though not exactly a euphemism like "confirmed bachelor", which has slid into becoming a different, milder pejorative.
How about "snag" for "sensitive New-Age guy". Haven't heard that one for quite awhile.
I use that one two ways: it makes a nice backhandedly annoying compliment for manly friends who have done something both commendable and 'sensitive', femmy, whatever; and a good tag for those who are purportedly sensitive but are actually passive-agressive tools.
How about "snag" for "sensitive New-Age guy".
We need more good acronyms. How come no one ever uses FROG (Federal Republic of Germany), PONY (Port of New York), or COLA (City of Los Angeles)?
Couldn't this thread be repurposed into abusing Ogged? Isn't that one of the main purposes, or in fact the single most important purpose, of our common enterprise here?
Is the union of the former GDR and FRG still called Bundesrepublik Deutschland? If so we could anacronymize it as BRaD.
Couldn't this thread be repurposed into abusing Ogged?
Myself, I think there should be a thread in which people nominate what they consider the funniest Unfogged comment threads. The comments to this post about Labs' testicles very nearly caused me to die of laughter. The thread has all the Unfogged staples: cock jokes, gay jokes, sexually charged repartee between BPhD and the guys, even w-lfs-n arguing with BPhD over the preferred plural of "clitoris." Returning to your Ogged-abuse theme, though, the preceding post about Ogged's dick has a much shorter (insert disparaging joke about Ogged's endowments here) and less funny comment thread, although the post itself is funny.
Wait, it's surprising when someone declares that a word, gay needs to be replaced with an equivalent effeminate-man-mocking word, that people discuss the definition of gay? Especially when shortly into the discussion gay gets redefined as 'oh, not effeminate-mocking', just 'weak'?
What was a discussion of the meaning of a word supposed to look like?
Sigh, this is the problem with you philosophy types. You will want words to have fixed meanings, and language to be transparant. It just ain't so. Natural language is nuanced and variable, and human communication is all about constant negotiation between intent and reception (which changes as audiences change, with time, with feedback and revision, etc. etc. etc.). The marvellous thing is that, nonetheless, we *do* mostly understand one another; it's just tricky to pin that down to exact explanations of how or why.
God, I love this stuff.
Emerson -
You're some crazed 60's version of the cranky old curmudgeon: "In my day, the kids did a lot more drugs. Kids today have no spirit!"
Fredrick -
It is well-settled in Unfogged-dom that this is the funniest of all Unfogged threads.
How do people do the struck-through "gay"?
I don't know how to get formatted tags to show up (fucking w-lfs-n), but the tag words are strike & /strike. Also, if you're using Firefox, you can select an example of the thing you want to do, right-click, select "view selction," and see how they did this.
And that is very nearly all the HTML I know.
Thanks, LB. But since I'm asking dumb questions, how did you demonstrate that for me without your demonstration appearing as struck-through?
So this is more acceptable? Rather than simply calling me gay, you emasculate me in public? I hate you (& w-lfs-n), I hate you (& w-lfs-n), I hate you (& w-lfs-n).
& is &. (Sometimes the semicolon is not required, sometimes it is, leading to hilarious confusion.)
I think IE, which I use, doesn't require the semicolons (accounting for my earlier ignorance) but other more civilized browsers do.
Wait, 27 didn't answer the question.
<strike>gay</strike>
is what LB had to type (modulo the semicolon thing) to get 20, I think. Relevant hilarious confusion here.
On preview, I see that LB explained the semicolon thing.
Do you guys see an ampersand in my previous comment?
All I did was type SHIFT-7.
This reminds me that "e e cummings" and its cognates "matt matt weinings" and "joe joe drymmings" fall nicely into the verbal pattern of "Ice Ice Baby," as per joe joe's masterpiece.
Something else reminds me that I wasn't planning to spend all day, or even all day before the Steelers game, commenting.
You can do a freestanding ampersand with SHIFT-7, but if you type 'SHIFT-7gt;' it will show up as > rather than >. If you see what I mean.
Do you guys see an ampersand in my previous comment?
Yes, that's how it appears.
I don't think the feminine stuff was simply a language problem. I understood what you meant, and disagreed.
Hey, I'm all for the rich taperstry of human language, and I love indirection and subtlety and all that good stuff, which I why I said I was distressed that our conceptions were wildly different. x/shade of x: awesome; x/~x: not so awesome.
But really very, very common. There's a reason for all of that insanely crufty lawyer-speak in legal documents (well, not for all of it, but for lots of it.) If you want to eliminate ambiguity, even in fairly simple concrete situations like business contracts rather than discussions of poetry or subtle human emotions, it is hard as the dickens, and leaves you saying things like "the aforesaid X performs Duties including but not limited to Y", where 'X', 'Y', and 'Duties' are all defined at length elsewhere. And the blasted things still end up being ambiguous.
Yeah, because what language do you think they use to define "Duties", etc?
How could we come to an agreement on the definition of "gay", when we couldn't even come to agreement about such simple words as "cool" or "funky"?
Hm, is everyone praying to Mecca or something?
Still arguing on that other thread, I think.
come to agreement about such simple words as "cool"
My understanding is that if you had to ask, you weren't, but that if you didn't ask but tried very hard without showing evidence of trying you had a chance to be. Kind of like Calvinism, except Calvinism isn't cool. Yet.
Coolness is not like Tao -- lack of awareness of cool and uncool is not the sign of a cool mind.
One can I think agree on the meaning of a word while disagreeing on its applications -- I bet most of us do agree about what 'cool' means roughly, even if we don't agree about what it is. This distinction between meaning and application of evaluative terms is surprisingly hard to work out. Or maybe it isn't surprising.
But I didn't say actual lack of awareness of cool, just feigned.
Sorry, didn't mean to be disagreeing, just ruminating.
Does coolness require an apparent lack of caring about cool? Maybe it does, where hipness does not. Maybe I shouldn't have been so quick to claim agreement on the concepts rather than the applications.
That's funny, I wouldn't think of either of those words as particularly slippery -- while funky has a bunch of meanings, they're mostly pretty easily distinguished; exuberantly sexy, as in dancing; pleasingly eccentric or off-beat; having gone bad, in food, particularly in a way that smells bad, and by extension any situation that could be likened to possibly spoiled food; and literally smelling like sex. And what's to say about cool? I can see disagreeing about what falls into the category, but it means (roughly) anything favored by a social elite of young people.
Q:Does coolness require an apparent lack of caring about cool?
A: (Cooly) Whatever.
Actually, I think LB's definition works best, but because people not quite in the social elite are trying to emulate them, the efforts of that elite to maintain their own coolness are not as apparent.
I actually have no idea what I'm talking about, as cool was not really much of a concept in my youth, which means of course that I wasn't. Not that there was anything wrong with that.
If I remember Happy Days, you also have to be categorically unable to apologize.
I don't know -- isn't the "favored by the elite of young people" more about hip than cool? Cool definitely suggests the antithesis of sloppy enthusiasm -- hence the appearing not to care. And the Fonz (I think).
I'm sure that there exists a category of young people which is witheringly contemptuous of "cool" thirty-somethings.
I think the meaning of cool is fairly consistent over time, and is associated, as the word suggests, with emotional temperature. Other, secondary meanings might correlate to hip, but it's essentially about being like Steve McQueen.
I'm sure that there exists a category of young people which is witheringly contemptuous of "cool" thirty-somethings.
I bet there exists a group of 57 year old men who feel the same way.
Moi? 57?
My 33 y.o. musician son is very cool, and he despises most other cool people, and all hippies.
Why should one expect that asking a person what a word means should produce anything better than one gets asking a peacock what he meant by spreading his tail, or a bee what that little jig-jig-cha-cha-cha meant when he got back from the new flower bed he discovered? Next, someone will be suggesting that asking the author about his intention tells us the meaning of a text. Bees and peacocks, of course, use a natural language. I'm not sure about Anglophones