It seems to me that you have a concept-shaped hole, where people are constantly talking about an idea you don’t get, and you have made a map-territory error in believing that they also do not have a referent here for the word. In general if a word has been in use for 100s of years, I think your prior should be that there is a referent there — I actually just googled it and the dictionary definition of dignity is the same as I gave (“the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect”), so I think this one is straightforward to figure out.
It is certainly possible that the other people around you also don’t have a referent and are just using words the way children play with lego, but I’d argue that still is insufficient reason to attempt to prevent people who do know what the word is intended to mean from using the word. It’s a larger discussion than this margin can contain, but my common attitude toward words losing their meaning in many people’s minds is that we ought to rescue the meaning rather than lose it.
I know what the word means, I just think in typical cases people should be saying a lot more about why something is undignified, because I don’t think people’s senses of dignity typically overlap that much, especially if the reader doesn’t typically read LW. In these cases I think permitting the use of the word “undignified” prevents specificity.
Gotcha. I think this text that you wrote is really ambiguous:
I mostly don’t really know what this means? I think it means “if I told someone that I did X, I would feel a bit embarassed.”
It’s ambiguous between you not having an explicit understanding of what the meaning of the words are, versus you not understanding what the person you’re speaking with is intending to convey (and the first meaning is IMO the more natural one).
I think having good norms around tabooing words is tricky. In this case, my sense is that some people are using the word in a relatively meaningless way that is actively unhelpful, but also that some people are using the word to mean something quite important, and it’s not great to remove the word for the second group. I think if you want to move toward people not using the word, you will get more buy-in if you include a proposed alternative for the second group, and in the absence there should mostly be a move toward “regularly ask someone to taboo the word” so that you can distinguish between the two kinds of uses.
It seems to me that you have a concept-shaped hole, where people are constantly talking about an idea you don’t get, and you have made a map-territory error in believing that they also do not have a referent here for the word. In general if a word has been in use for 100s of years, I think your prior should be that there is a referent there — I actually just googled it and the dictionary definition of dignity is the same as I gave (“the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect”), so I think this one is straightforward to figure out.
It is certainly possible that the other people around you also don’t have a referent and are just using words the way children play with lego, but I’d argue that still is insufficient reason to attempt to prevent people who do know what the word is intended to mean from using the word. It’s a larger discussion than this margin can contain, but my common attitude toward words losing their meaning in many people’s minds is that we ought to rescue the meaning rather than lose it.
I know what the word means, I just think in typical cases people should be saying a lot more about why something is undignified, because I don’t think people’s senses of dignity typically overlap that much, especially if the reader doesn’t typically read LW. In these cases I think permitting the use of the word “undignified” prevents specificity.
Gotcha. I think this text that you wrote is really ambiguous:
It’s ambiguous between you not having an explicit understanding of what the meaning of the words are, versus you not understanding what the person you’re speaking with is intending to convey (and the first meaning is IMO the more natural one).
I think having good norms around tabooing words is tricky. In this case, my sense is that some people are using the word in a relatively meaningless way that is actively unhelpful, but also that some people are using the word to mean something quite important, and it’s not great to remove the word for the second group. I think if you want to move toward people not using the word, you will get more buy-in if you include a proposed alternative for the second group, and in the absence there should mostly be a move toward “regularly ask someone to taboo the word” so that you can distinguish between the two kinds of uses.