I definitely agree with the general principle of this post and the “technology” example made the principle clear and useful to me, but something feels off about applying this principle to the “chemicals” example. I think it’s because most of the time, when someone says that something has “chemicals”, what they mean is that it contains ingredients that aren’t “natural”, which is a term I’ve always found very confusing. There are plenty of technically false dichotomies that are nevertheless useful approximations, e.g. I’m sure there are edge cases between deciduous and evergreen trees, but it’s an obviously useful label when discussing whether or not you expect a tree to have leaves in the winter.
But I genuinely don’t know what “natural” is supposed to (approximately) carve up, especially in the realm of foods. If you boil tea leaves, are the resulting compounds natural? If yes, then at what point do things become unnatural? If no, then is anything that’s not raw and unprocessed unnatural, including e.g. cooked meat or boiled potatoes? There is clearly a spectrum between “raw and unprocessed” and “industrially engineered” but I don’t see any reasonable place to draw the line. And this makes the word “natural” in the context of foods too vague to be useful—every time someone uses it, you have to ask a series of followup questions to figure out where they (arbitrarily) draw the line.
And so I think a reasonable followup to “this food contains chemicals” is “virtually everything is chemicals—what do you mean it contains chemicals?” This is essentially a less snarky version of your “no” example, but I don’t think it’s stripping from someone a word we don’t have an optimal replacement for—it’s stripping from someone a word that is not clear enough to have any substantial meaning without further clarification. That is, it’s stripping from someone a word that wastes everyone else’s time.
This makes me want to slightly amend your rule: “Thou shalt not strike a term from others’ expressive vocabulary without suitable replacement unless the term invariably requires thou to ask for a clarifying definition.”—someone who gets really annoyed when people assume their arbitrary threshold in (un)natural-space is everyone else’s.
I want to point out that there are lots of situations where English speakers fluently use words that don’t have clear dividing lines between their applicability and their inapplicability—it depends on context and details. “The music is loud.” What if I’m deaf or far away or like to be able to feel the bass line in my bones? That doesn’t make the sentence impermissible or even hard to understand and I don’t need the speaker to produce a decibel value. “If you go to high altitudes, the air is thinner and you might get dizzy.” How high? If I’m dizzy in Denver and the speaker thinks you shouldn’t need to adjust your behavior until there are Sherpas about and meanwhile Batman can breathe in space, that doesn’t make the sentence false, let alone useless. “It’s cold, bring a jacket.” Oh you sweet summer child, I’m good in short sleeves, thanks, I just don’t know what you meant by “cold” -
There are lots of conversational purposes for which you don’t in fact have to know where someone draws the line. You don’t even need to be able to agree on every point’s ordering in the spectrum (“it’s colder today” “that’s just windchill”). The words gesture in a direction. I think “chemicals” does too, and you know what direction because you came up with “unprocessed” as a gloss on “low in chemicals”. If someone doesn’t buy that brand of dip because it’s full of chemicals, in your innocent confusion I suggest you glance at the ingredients list for a guess at the threshold in question.
I suspect pointing out someone’s confusion about the scope of the terms ‘natural’ and ‘chemicals’ is a proxy (not necessarily a bad one) for pointing out that their whole thinking on the topic is confused. It’s a sign they assume incorrectly that natural (whatever they mean by it) is good and chemical (likewise) is bad, which is usually what they are implying.
E.g. I heard someone on the radio talking about this re the term ‘processed’ food; he said people who disapprove of processed food might say it’s much better to eat e.g. pasta with some parmesan and wine. Whereas in fact those are all highly processed foods too. So pointing this out is a more polite way of saying “your thinking is so muddled you haven’t even thought through what counts as ‘processed’ (or ‘natural’ or ‘chemical’), so you’re not justified in assuming that that entails something is good or bad, which indeed it doesn’t.” Which seems a valid point.
I definitely agree with the general principle of this post and the “technology” example made the principle clear and useful to me, but something feels off about applying this principle to the “chemicals” example. I think it’s because most of the time, when someone says that something has “chemicals”, what they mean is that it contains ingredients that aren’t “natural”, which is a term I’ve always found very confusing. There are plenty of technically false dichotomies that are nevertheless useful approximations, e.g. I’m sure there are edge cases between deciduous and evergreen trees, but it’s an obviously useful label when discussing whether or not you expect a tree to have leaves in the winter.
But I genuinely don’t know what “natural” is supposed to (approximately) carve up, especially in the realm of foods. If you boil tea leaves, are the resulting compounds natural? If yes, then at what point do things become unnatural? If no, then is anything that’s not raw and unprocessed unnatural, including e.g. cooked meat or boiled potatoes? There is clearly a spectrum between “raw and unprocessed” and “industrially engineered” but I don’t see any reasonable place to draw the line. And this makes the word “natural” in the context of foods too vague to be useful—every time someone uses it, you have to ask a series of followup questions to figure out where they (arbitrarily) draw the line.
And so I think a reasonable followup to “this food contains chemicals” is “virtually everything is chemicals—what do you mean it contains chemicals?” This is essentially a less snarky version of your “no” example, but I don’t think it’s stripping from someone a word we don’t have an optimal replacement for—it’s stripping from someone a word that is not clear enough to have any substantial meaning without further clarification. That is, it’s stripping from someone a word that wastes everyone else’s time.
This makes me want to slightly amend your rule: “Thou shalt not strike a term from others’ expressive vocabulary without suitable replacement unless the term invariably requires thou to ask for a clarifying definition.”—someone who gets really annoyed when people assume their arbitrary threshold in (un)natural-space is everyone else’s.
I want to point out that there are lots of situations where English speakers fluently use words that don’t have clear dividing lines between their applicability and their inapplicability—it depends on context and details. “The music is loud.” What if I’m deaf or far away or like to be able to feel the bass line in my bones? That doesn’t make the sentence impermissible or even hard to understand and I don’t need the speaker to produce a decibel value. “If you go to high altitudes, the air is thinner and you might get dizzy.” How high? If I’m dizzy in Denver and the speaker thinks you shouldn’t need to adjust your behavior until there are Sherpas about and meanwhile Batman can breathe in space, that doesn’t make the sentence false, let alone useless. “It’s cold, bring a jacket.” Oh you sweet summer child, I’m good in short sleeves, thanks, I just don’t know what you meant by “cold” -
There are lots of conversational purposes for which you don’t in fact have to know where someone draws the line. You don’t even need to be able to agree on every point’s ordering in the spectrum (“it’s colder today” “that’s just windchill”). The words gesture in a direction. I think “chemicals” does too, and you know what direction because you came up with “unprocessed” as a gloss on “low in chemicals”. If someone doesn’t buy that brand of dip because it’s full of chemicals, in your innocent confusion I suggest you glance at the ingredients list for a guess at the threshold in question.
I suspect pointing out someone’s confusion about the scope of the terms ‘natural’ and ‘chemicals’ is a proxy (not necessarily a bad one) for pointing out that their whole thinking on the topic is confused. It’s a sign they assume incorrectly that natural (whatever they mean by it) is good and chemical (likewise) is bad, which is usually what they are implying.
E.g. I heard someone on the radio talking about this re the term ‘processed’ food; he said people who disapprove of processed food might say it’s much better to eat e.g. pasta with some parmesan and wine. Whereas in fact those are all highly processed foods too. So pointing this out is a more polite way of saying “your thinking is so muddled you haven’t even thought through what counts as ‘processed’ (or ‘natural’ or ‘chemical’), so you’re not justified in assuming that that entails something is good or bad, which indeed it doesn’t.” Which seems a valid point.