It seems like the author is defying the common usage without a reason here. The common usage of edible is “safe to eat”, or more precisely “able to be eaten without killing you”, and I don’t see what use redefining it to mean “able to be swallowed” is. It just seems like a trite, definitional argument that is primarily about status.
Can you explain how so? This does not seem obvious to me. It seems broadly true, but not broadly useful. (And I’m not really sure what you mean by useful anyway.)
I think I get it. If you have a big weapon of doom that will ruin everything, it’s not useless; you can use it when you’re absolutely desperate. So options that sound completely stupid are worth looking at when you need a last resort.
Having a scary desperate option, along with clear, publicly-known criteria which will trigger it, can prevent things from deteriorating to the point where you’ll be tempted to use that desperate option. A honeybee will die if it stings you, but it will sting you if it feels too threatened, so people try to avoid antagonizing honeybees, and the bees don’t end up dead because people didn’t antagonize them.
I agree with the sense of your comment but wish to nitpick—I think “nontoxic” means you can eat it without it killing you. Crayons fit this definition, but are not properly called “edible”; many flowers can be eaten without killing you but “edible flowers” are the ones you might actually want to eat on purpose. “Edible” is narrower.
I take “All mushrooms are edible. But some of them you can eat only once.” to be a useful warning, hopefully made more memorable by being framed as a joke.
Apart from the hilarious joke, this quote makes the point that “will kill you” is not actually the same as impossible to eat, which more generally generally points out that impossible is often used in place of “really bad idea.”
I read edible as a synonym for eatable. Poisonous mushrooms: edible. rocks, not edible. That’s how that word is attatched in my head. I assume you read it as non-poisonous/fit to eat so it feels like a crass and overt redefinition. If the guy who wrote that reads that word the same way I assume you do it’s a really cheap joke. If he doesn’t the quote makes a lot of sense.
You and Alicorn are confusing denotation and connotation here. “Edible” simply means “able to be eaten”; it is used instead of “eatable”, because the latter is for some reason not considered a “standard” or “legitimate” word. As such, it possesses exactly the same semantics as “eatable” would; in fact, a sufficiently supercilious English teacher will correct you to “edible” if you say “eatable”. (Similarly “legible” instead of “readable”, although “readable” seems to be increasingly accepted these days.)
Yes, it’s true that people only usually apply the word to a more restricted subset of things than those which won’t kill the eater; but such a behavioral tendency should not be confused with the actual semantics of the word.
The sense of the quote is exactly the same as if it had been:
All mushrooms can be eaten. But some of them can be eaten only once.
In this case, it would hardly be legitimate to complain that “can be eaten” means “safe to be eaten”. The fact is that the phrase is ambiguous, and the quote is a play on that ambiguity. Likewise in its original form, with “edible”.
It just seems like a...definitional argument that is primarily about status.
You’ve just provided a reasonable first-approximation analysis of wit!
Of course ‘edible’ does literally mean ‘can be eaten’, and equally of course, it is normally interpreted as ‘fit to be eaten’. That’s why paleohacks writes it that way. It’s a joke!
(Similarly “legible” instead of “readable”, although “readable” seems to be increasingly accepted these days.)
Something “illegible” cannot have its component characters distinguished or identified. Something that is merely “unreadable” might just have ridiculously convoluted syntax or something.
Indeed. Given people like Monsieur Mangetout or disorders like pica, it’s hard to see why we would even bother using the word ‘edible’ if it didn’t mean fit to be eaten.
The fact that there exist lexicographers who are guilty of the same confusion does not make it any less of a confusion.
What would, then? If every English speaker on this planet only normally used “edible” to mean ‘fit to be eaten’, would they be all wrong?
“-ible” is the same as “-able”. (The difference has only to do with which conjugation the Latin verb belonged to.)
So what? “Forgivable” normally means ‘easy to forgive’, not ‘which could be forgiven, at least in principle’. So it’s not just -ible words to which that applies.
Actually not being confused. This isn’t a question of authority, at all.
If every English speaker on this planet only normally used “edible” to mean ‘fit to be eaten’, would they be all wrong?
There are a number of issues to untangle here.
First, “fit to be eaten” is not actually very different from “able to be eaten”. The meaning of “able” depends on context. In normal life, one describes something as “able to be eaten” if it is “fit to be eaten”. But this may not apply in all contexts. So, the meaning of “able” is not fixed. Therefore, neither is the meaning of “-able/-ible”.
Secondly, as I discussed in the comments above regarding denotation and connotation, a word can have patterns of being applied that do not affect its inherent meaning. So, even if nobody on the planet bothered to utter the following sentence:
Monsieur Mangetout demonstrated that many more things are edible than previously believed.
that does not, in itself, make the sentence false. (In fact, the sentence, in its own context, is true—it’s just that the meaning of “able” implicit in the word “edible” is not the ordinary one. For ordinary purposes, metals etc. are not “able to be eaten”. But technically, in extreme contexts, they may be.)
“Forgivable” normally means ‘easy to forgive’, not ‘which could be forgiven, at least in principle’
Disagree entirely. If I say something is “unforgivable”, I mean it cannot be forgiven, not merely that forgiveness would be difficult.
The reference includes both sexes and if anything placing the first emphasis on “having a penis” when describing “f*able” is a perspective biased towards people who would like to have sex with males—a primarily female attitude with homosexual (or bisexual) males as a secondary group. The “androcentric” answer would have only mentioned (or at least opened with) the things that the “andro” kind of person would have sex with.
By Army1987′s proposed definition, an entity that neither has a functional penis nor can be penetrated by a functional penis is definitionally not fuckable.
That seems pretty clearly to be a penis-centric definition of fuckability. (A functional-penis-centric definition, at that. Cucumbers, for example, are not by this definition fuckable, however women may feel about them.) In the same way that “has a functional vagina or is capable of being inserted into one” would be a vagina-centric definition of fuckability.
Admittedly, penis-centric isn’t quite the same thing as androcentric… not all men have penises, after all, and not all penises are attached to men… but given that the community of penis-havers overlaps so significantly with the set of men, treating the two groups as roughly equivalent doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
I don’t say here that this is a bad thing, or really express any moral judgment about it at all. Mostly I think it’s a silly digression from a silly discussion, my own contribution to it no less so than anyone’s, and we should all be downvoted for contributing to it.
But if we’re going to get pedantic about it, I’d have to say that Never_Seen_Belgrade’s position here is at least more straightforward than yours.
But if we’re going to get pedantic about it, I’d have to say that NeverSeenBelgrade’s position here is at least more straightforward than yours.
It is more ‘straightforward’ only in as much as it is a simplification in the direction of ‘wrong’. (And self described ‘sniping’ should be more accurate than the sniped comment, not less.)
(Similarly “legible” instead of “readable”, although “readable” seems to be increasingly accepted these days.)
I’ve seen a distinction being made between “legible” applying to typography etc. and “readable” applying to grammar etc., so that a über-complicated technical text typeset in LaTeX would be legible but not readable, and a story for children written in an awful handwriting would be readable but not legible.
Yes, it’s true that people only usually apply the word to a more restricted subset of things than those which won’t kill the eater; but such a behavioral tendency should not be confused with the actual semantics of the word.
To claim that the actual semantics of a word can be defined by anything other than the behavioural tendencies of its users is, at best, highly controversial. Whatever you or I may think, “irregardless” just is a (near) synonym for “regardless” and, to judge from my own experience (and the majority of comments from native speakers on the thread) “edible” actually means “safe to eat” (although, as Alicorn says, it’s a little bit more complicated than that).
Words mean exactly what people use them to mean—there is no higher authority (in English, at least, there isn’t even a plausible candidate for a higher authority).
To claim that the actual semantics of a word can be defined by anything other than the behavioural tendencies of its users is, at best, highly controversial. Whatever you or I may think, “irregardless” just is a (near) synonym for “regardless”
I’m advisedly ignoring the original context, but I’m curious about the idea that your behavioral tendencies in particular (and mine) with respect to the usage of “irregardless” don’t affect the actual semantics of the word. At best, it seems that “irregardless” both is and is not a synonym for “regardless”… as well as both being and not being an antonym of it.
Unless only some usages count? Perhaps there’s some kind of mechanism for extrapolating coherent semantics from the jumble of conflicting usages. Is it simple majoritarianism?
To claim that the actual semantics of a word can be defined by anything other than the behavioural tendencies of its users is, at best, highly controversial.
On the contrary, it’s trivially true. If semantics depended exclusively on behavior patterns, then novel thoughts would not be expressible. The meaning of the word “yellow” does not logically depend solely on which yellow objects in the universe accidentally happen to have been labeled “yellow” by humans. It is entirely possible that, sitting on a planet somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy, is a yellow glekdoftx. Under the negation-of-my-theory (I’ll try not to strawman you by saying “under your theory”), that would be impossible, because, due to the fact that humans have never previously described a glekdoftx as “yellow”, the extension of that term does not include any glekdoftxes. Examples like this should suffice to demonstrate that semantic information does not just contain information about verbal behavior; it also contains information about logical relationships.
edible” actually means “safe to eat
Guess what: I agree! Here, indeed, is my proof of this fact:
“Edible” means “able to be eaten”.
In the relevant contexts, “able to be eaten” means “safe to eat”.
Therefore, “edible” means “safe to eat”.
See how easy that was? And yet, here I am, dealing with a combinatorial explosion of hostile comments (and even downvotes), all because I dared to make a mildly nontrivial, ever-so-slightly inferentially distant point!
Insert exclamation of frustration here.
Words mean exactly what people use them to mean—there is no higher authority
Yes, that thought is in my cache too. It doesn’t address my point, which is more subtle.
It’s reasonable to play with the expected meanings—but playing with the expected meanings in this case seems inconsistent with applying the label “Rationality Quote.”
The quote is isomorphic to “Don’t eat poisonous things—and some things are poisonous.” That quote won’t get upvotes if posted as a Rationality Quote—why should its equivalent?
The quote is isomorphic to “Don’t eat poisonous things—and some things are poisonous.” That quote won’t get upvotes if posted as a Rationality Quote—why should its equivalent?
I don’t see the equivalence.
But remember, I’m not defending the quote as a Rationality Quote. I’m only defending the quote against the charge of inappropriate word choice.
I don’t think I’m confusing the two, I’m saying the connotation is what’s important when the connotation is what is almost always used. And I’m not claiming that the quote is wrong, just that it’s not really a rationality quote.
I don’t think I’m confusing the two, I’m saying the connotation is what’s important when the connotation is what is almost always used.
Unfortunately, this sentence itself seems to betray some confusion: “connotation” is not a kind of alternative definition; hence it makes no sense to say that “the connotation is what is almost always used”. Rather, both denotation and connotation are always present whenever a word is used. “Connotation” refers to implications a word has outside of its meaning. For example, the words “copulate” and “fuck” have the same meaning (denotation), but differing connotations.
The crucial difference is that, while changing the denotation of a word (or getting it wrong) can change the truth-value of a statement, merely changing the connotation never can. Instead, it merely changes the register, signaling-value, or “appropriateness” of the statement. A scientist, in the ordinary course of affairs, might report having observed two lizards copulating; but it would be rather shocking to read in a scientific paper about lizards fucking, and one virtually never does. However, if a scientist ever were to write such a thing, the complaint would not be that they had claimed something false; it would be merely that they had made an inappropriate choice of language.
A lot of verbal humor results from using “inappropriate” connotations. The “edible” quote is an example of this, in fact. The listener understands that the sentence is true but still “off” in some way. Using an inappropriate connotation is not a misuse of the word, otherwise the humor wouldn’t work (or at least, it wouldn’t work in the same way—there are other forms of verbal humor which do involve incorrect usage).
And I’m not claiming that the quote is wrong, just that it’s not really a rationality quote
Well, I agree about that—but that doesn’t really seem to have been the main thrust of your comment. Your claim seemed to be that the quotee had redefined the word “edible”; and this is what I am disputing.
I don’t mean that your reasoning was silly, I mean that the an argument over the interpretation of a word, when you all know exactly what was meant in the original comment, is silly.
So I do think that the topic is unimportant, but my intended message was rather that you two are beating a dead horse rather vigorously. It’s kind of funny, from the outside looking in.
It is not clear to me that it follows, hypothetically, from the fact that an argument is silly, that no one is entitled to be interested in the topic the argument is ostensibly about.
I took “argument” to mean “dispute” in the context, and interpreted the comment as meaning “this dispute is about an unimportant topic”.
If the meaning was specifically that my argument (i.e. in support of my position) was “silly”, then of course the comment—which lacked any attempt at justification—was even more rude.
It seems like the author is defying the common usage without a reason here. The common usage of edible is “safe to eat”, or more precisely “able to be eaten without killing you”, and I don’t see what use redefining it to mean “able to be swallowed” is. It just seems like a trite, definitional argument that is primarily about status.
Nonetheless, the sentiment “You can do X, but only once” seems broadly useful.
Can you explain how so? This does not seem obvious to me. It seems broadly true, but not broadly useful. (And I’m not really sure what you mean by useful anyway.)
My model of Eliezer says: “You can launch AGI, but only once.”
I think I get it. If you have a big weapon of doom that will ruin everything, it’s not useless; you can use it when you’re absolutely desperate. So options that sound completely stupid are worth looking at when you need a last resort.
Having a scary desperate option, along with clear, publicly-known criteria which will trigger it, can prevent things from deteriorating to the point where you’ll be tempted to use that desperate option. A honeybee will die if it stings you, but it will sting you if it feels too threatened, so people try to avoid antagonizing honeybees, and the bees don’t end up dead because people didn’t antagonize them.
Related: Thomas Schelling’s “Strategy of Conflict”.
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean the price for doing it is acceptable.
Just because the price for doing something is your own death (or consignment to non-volatile ROM) doesn’t mean the price is unacceptable.
I agree with the sense of your comment but wish to nitpick—I think “nontoxic” means you can eat it without it killing you. Crayons fit this definition, but are not properly called “edible”; many flowers can be eaten without killing you but “edible flowers” are the ones you might actually want to eat on purpose. “Edible” is narrower.
I take “All mushrooms are edible. But some of them you can eat only once.” to be a useful warning, hopefully made more memorable by being framed as a joke.
Apart from the hilarious joke, this quote makes the point that “will kill you” is not actually the same as impossible to eat, which more generally generally points out that impossible is often used in place of “really bad idea.”
I read edible as a synonym for eatable. Poisonous mushrooms: edible. rocks, not edible. That’s how that word is attatched in my head. I assume you read it as non-poisonous/fit to eat so it feels like a crass and overt redefinition. If the guy who wrote that reads that word the same way I assume you do it’s a really cheap joke. If he doesn’t the quote makes a lot of sense.
Sure. It’s really an amusing play on words more than a rationality quote.
You and Alicorn are confusing denotation and connotation here. “Edible” simply means “able to be eaten”; it is used instead of “eatable”, because the latter is for some reason not considered a “standard” or “legitimate” word. As such, it possesses exactly the same semantics as “eatable” would; in fact, a sufficiently supercilious English teacher will correct you to “edible” if you say “eatable”. (Similarly “legible” instead of “readable”, although “readable” seems to be increasingly accepted these days.)
Yes, it’s true that people only usually apply the word to a more restricted subset of things than those which won’t kill the eater; but such a behavioral tendency should not be confused with the actual semantics of the word.
The sense of the quote is exactly the same as if it had been:
In this case, it would hardly be legitimate to complain that “can be eaten” means “safe to be eaten”. The fact is that the phrase is ambiguous, and the quote is a play on that ambiguity. Likewise in its original form, with “edible”.
You’ve just provided a reasonable first-approximation analysis of wit!
Of course ‘edible’ does literally mean ‘can be eaten’, and equally of course, it is normally interpreted as ‘fit to be eaten’. That’s why paleohacks writes it that way. It’s a joke!
When did this turn into the jokes thread?
If you’re not having fun, why bother?
Something “illegible” cannot have its component characters distinguished or identified. Something that is merely “unreadable” might just have ridiculously convoluted syntax or something.
The standard definition of edible is fit to be eaten, not “able to be eaten”.
Indeed. Given people like Monsieur Mangetout or disorders like pica, it’s hard to see why we would even bother using the word ‘edible’ if it didn’t mean fit to be eaten.
The fact that there exist lexicographers who are guilty of the same confusion does not make it any less of a confusion.
“-ible” is the same as “-able”. (The difference has only to do with which conjugation the Latin verb belonged to.)
What would, then? If every English speaker on this planet only normally used “edible” to mean ‘fit to be eaten’, would they be all wrong?
So what? “Forgivable” normally means ‘easy to forgive’, not ‘which could be forgiven, at least in principle’. So it’s not just -ible words to which that applies.
Actually not being confused. This isn’t a question of authority, at all.
There are a number of issues to untangle here.
First, “fit to be eaten” is not actually very different from “able to be eaten”. The meaning of “able” depends on context. In normal life, one describes something as “able to be eaten” if it is “fit to be eaten”. But this may not apply in all contexts. So, the meaning of “able” is not fixed. Therefore, neither is the meaning of “-able/-ible”.
Secondly, as I discussed in the comments above regarding denotation and connotation, a word can have patterns of being applied that do not affect its inherent meaning. So, even if nobody on the planet bothered to utter the following sentence:
that does not, in itself, make the sentence false. (In fact, the sentence, in its own context, is true—it’s just that the meaning of “able” implicit in the word “edible” is not the ordinary one. For ordinary purposes, metals etc. are not “able to be eaten”. But technically, in extreme contexts, they may be.)
Disagree entirely. If I say something is “unforgivable”, I mean it cannot be forgiven, not merely that forgiveness would be difficult.
What about “f\*able”? Does it mean ‘anybody with a functional penis and/or any orifice able to be penetrated by one’? :-)
Take a look at the syllogism I provided here for “edible”, and construct the analogous one yourself.
Psst. Your penetrate-centricity is showing.
I don’t want to detour into “What is fuck?” but I do want to drop by to snipe. Just like that.
(Edited in response to reasonable criticism.)
The reference includes both sexes and if anything placing the first emphasis on “having a penis” when describing “f*able” is a perspective biased towards people who would like to have sex with males—a primarily female attitude with homosexual (or bisexual) males as a secondary group. The “androcentric” answer would have only mentioned (or at least opened with) the things that the “andro” kind of person would have sex with.
By Army1987′s proposed definition, an entity that neither has a functional penis nor can be penetrated by a functional penis is definitionally not fuckable.
That seems pretty clearly to be a penis-centric definition of fuckability. (A functional-penis-centric definition, at that. Cucumbers, for example, are not by this definition fuckable, however women may feel about them.) In the same way that “has a functional vagina or is capable of being inserted into one” would be a vagina-centric definition of fuckability.
Admittedly, penis-centric isn’t quite the same thing as androcentric… not all men have penises, after all, and not all penises are attached to men… but given that the community of penis-havers overlaps so significantly with the set of men, treating the two groups as roughly equivalent doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
I don’t say here that this is a bad thing, or really express any moral judgment about it at all. Mostly I think it’s a silly digression from a silly discussion, my own contribution to it no less so than anyone’s, and we should all be downvoted for contributing to it.
But if we’re going to get pedantic about it, I’d have to say that Never_Seen_Belgrade’s position here is at least more straightforward than yours.
It is more ‘straightforward’ only in as much as it is a simplification in the direction of ‘wrong’. (And self described ‘sniping’ should be more accurate than the sniped comment, not less.)
You’re missing the point but you’re still kind of right. So I fixed it.
The fault for the point missed likely lies on the absent clarity I sacrificed for brevity.
I’ve seen a distinction being made between “legible” applying to typography etc. and “readable” applying to grammar etc., so that a über-complicated technical text typeset in LaTeX would be legible but not readable, and a story for children written in an awful handwriting would be readable but not legible.
To claim that the actual semantics of a word can be defined by anything other than the behavioural tendencies of its users is, at best, highly controversial. Whatever you or I may think, “irregardless” just is a (near) synonym for “regardless” and, to judge from my own experience (and the majority of comments from native speakers on the thread) “edible” actually means “safe to eat” (although, as Alicorn says, it’s a little bit more complicated than that).
Words mean exactly what people use them to mean—there is no higher authority (in English, at least, there isn’t even a plausible candidate for a higher authority).
I’m advisedly ignoring the original context, but I’m curious about the idea that your behavioral tendencies in particular (and mine) with respect to the usage of “irregardless” don’t affect the actual semantics of the word. At best, it seems that “irregardless” both is and is not a synonym for “regardless”… as well as both being and not being an antonym of it.
Unless only some usages count? Perhaps there’s some kind of mechanism for extrapolating coherent semantics from the jumble of conflicting usages. Is it simple majoritarianism?
On the contrary, it’s trivially true. If semantics depended exclusively on behavior patterns, then novel thoughts would not be expressible. The meaning of the word “yellow” does not logically depend solely on which yellow objects in the universe accidentally happen to have been labeled “yellow” by humans. It is entirely possible that, sitting on a planet somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy, is a yellow glekdoftx. Under the negation-of-my-theory (I’ll try not to strawman you by saying “under your theory”), that would be impossible, because, due to the fact that humans have never previously described a glekdoftx as “yellow”, the extension of that term does not include any glekdoftxes. Examples like this should suffice to demonstrate that semantic information does not just contain information about verbal behavior; it also contains information about logical relationships.
Guess what: I agree! Here, indeed, is my proof of this fact:
“Edible” means “able to be eaten”.
In the relevant contexts, “able to be eaten” means “safe to eat”.
Therefore, “edible” means “safe to eat”.
See how easy that was? And yet, here I am, dealing with a combinatorial explosion of hostile comments (and even downvotes), all because I dared to make a mildly nontrivial, ever-so-slightly inferentially distant point!
Insert exclamation of frustration here.
Yes, that thought is in my cache too. It doesn’t address my point, which is more subtle.
It’s reasonable to play with the expected meanings—but playing with the expected meanings in this case seems inconsistent with applying the label “Rationality Quote.”
The quote is isomorphic to “Don’t eat poisonous things—and some things are poisonous.” That quote won’t get upvotes if posted as a Rationality Quote—why should its equivalent?
I don’t see the equivalence.
But remember, I’m not defending the quote as a Rationality Quote. I’m only defending the quote against the charge of inappropriate word choice.
Upvoted for this.
I don’t think I’m confusing the two, I’m saying the connotation is what’s important when the connotation is what is almost always used. And I’m not claiming that the quote is wrong, just that it’s not really a rationality quote.
Unfortunately, this sentence itself seems to betray some confusion: “connotation” is not a kind of alternative definition; hence it makes no sense to say that “the connotation is what is almost always used”. Rather, both denotation and connotation are always present whenever a word is used. “Connotation” refers to implications a word has outside of its meaning. For example, the words “copulate” and “fuck” have the same meaning (denotation), but differing connotations.
The crucial difference is that, while changing the denotation of a word (or getting it wrong) can change the truth-value of a statement, merely changing the connotation never can. Instead, it merely changes the register, signaling-value, or “appropriateness” of the statement. A scientist, in the ordinary course of affairs, might report having observed two lizards copulating; but it would be rather shocking to read in a scientific paper about lizards fucking, and one virtually never does. However, if a scientist ever were to write such a thing, the complaint would not be that they had claimed something false; it would be merely that they had made an inappropriate choice of language.
A lot of verbal humor results from using “inappropriate” connotations. The “edible” quote is an example of this, in fact. The listener understands that the sentence is true but still “off” in some way. Using an inappropriate connotation is not a misuse of the word, otherwise the humor wouldn’t work (or at least, it wouldn’t work in the same way—there are other forms of verbal humor which do involve incorrect usage).
Well, I agree about that—but that doesn’t really seem to have been the main thrust of your comment. Your claim seemed to be that the quotee had redefined the word “edible”; and this is what I am disputing.
This is a silly argument.
This is an unjustifiably rude comment.
The fact that you may not personally be interested in a topic does not mean that no one else is entitled to be.
I don’t mean that your reasoning was silly, I mean that the an argument over the interpretation of a word, when you all know exactly what was meant in the original comment, is silly.
So I do think that the topic is unimportant, but my intended message was rather that you two are beating a dead horse rather vigorously. It’s kind of funny, from the outside looking in.
It is not clear to me that it follows, hypothetically, from the fact that an argument is silly, that no one is entitled to be interested in the topic the argument is ostensibly about.
I took “argument” to mean “dispute” in the context, and interpreted the comment as meaning “this dispute is about an unimportant topic”.
If the meaning was specifically that my argument (i.e. in support of my position) was “silly”, then of course the comment—which lacked any attempt at justification—was even more rude.