(My point in the comment above is merely “this is not contentless filler; these distinctions are real in practice; if adding them feels onerous or tedious it’s more likely because one is blind to, or does not care about, a real distinction, than because there’s no real difference and people want you to waste time adding meaningless words.” A lot of people act along lines that go something like “well these words SHOULD be taken to mean X, even though they predictably and reliably get interpreted to mean Y, so I’m going to keep saying them and when other people hear ‘Y’ I’ll blame them, and when other people ask me to say something different I will act put-upon.” <—That’s a caricature/extremer version of the actual position the actual Gordon takes; I’m not claiming Gordon’s saying or doing anything anywhere near that dumb, but it’s clear that there really are differences in how these different phrases are perceived, at the level of hundreds-of-readers.)
Is it wrong for Bob the Democrat to say “based” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a conservative? Is it wrong for Bob the plumber to say “edema” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a a doctor? If I told Bob to start saying “swelling” instead of “edema” then I feel like he would have some right to defend his word use: no one thinks edema literally means “swelling, and also I am a doctor” even if they update in a way that kind of looks like it does.
I don’t think we have a significant disagreement here, I was merely trying to highlight a distinction your comment didn’t dwell on, about different ways statements can be perceived differently. “There is swelling” vs “There is swelling and also I am a doctor” literally means something different while “There is swelling” vs “There is edema” merely implies something different to people familiar with who tends to use which words.
“There is swelling” vs “There is swelling and also I am a doctor” literally means something different while “There is swelling” vs “There is edema” merely implies something different to people familiar with who tends to use which words.
Yes, but I don’t think this is particularly analogous, specifically because the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “swelling” and “edema” seems to me like it’s likely at least an order of magnitude smaller than the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “this is crazy” and “this sounds crazy to me.”
As for whether either of these usages are wrong, it depends entirely on whether you want to successfully communicate or not. If you reliably cause your listener to receive concepts that are different than those you were trying to transmit, and this is down to utterly predictable boring simple truths about your language usage, it’s certainly your call if you want to keep doing a thing you know will cause wrong beliefs in the people around you.
Separately, 100% of the people I’ve encountered using the word “based” are radical leftist transfolk, and there are like twelve of them?
I understood “based” to be a 4chan-ism but I didn’t think very hard about the example, it is possible I chose a word that does not actually work in the way I had meant to illustrate. Hopefully the intended meaning was still clear.
(My point in the comment above is merely “this is not contentless filler; these distinctions are real in practice; if adding them feels onerous or tedious it’s more likely because one is blind to, or does not care about, a real distinction, than because there’s no real difference and people want you to waste time adding meaningless words.” A lot of people act along lines that go something like “well these words SHOULD be taken to mean X, even though they predictably and reliably get interpreted to mean Y, so I’m going to keep saying them and when other people hear ‘Y’ I’ll blame them, and when other people ask me to say something different I will act put-upon.” <—That’s a caricature/extremer version of the actual position the actual Gordon takes; I’m not claiming Gordon’s saying or doing anything anywhere near that dumb, but it’s clear that there really are differences in how these different phrases are perceived, at the level of hundreds-of-readers.)
Is it wrong for Bob the Democrat to say “based” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a conservative? Is it wrong for Bob the plumber to say “edema” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a a doctor? If I told Bob to start saying “swelling” instead of “edema” then I feel like he would have some right to defend his word use: no one thinks edema literally means “swelling, and also I am a doctor” even if they update in a way that kind of looks like it does.
I don’t think we have a significant disagreement here, I was merely trying to highlight a distinction your comment didn’t dwell on, about different ways statements can be perceived differently. “There is swelling” vs “There is swelling and also I am a doctor” literally means something different while “There is swelling” vs “There is edema” merely implies something different to people familiar with who tends to use which words.
Yes, but I don’t think this is particularly analogous, specifically because the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “swelling” and “edema” seems to me like it’s likely at least an order of magnitude smaller than the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “this is crazy” and “this sounds crazy to me.”
As for whether either of these usages are wrong, it depends entirely on whether you want to successfully communicate or not. If you reliably cause your listener to receive concepts that are different than those you were trying to transmit, and this is down to utterly predictable boring simple truths about your language usage, it’s certainly your call if you want to keep doing a thing you know will cause wrong beliefs in the people around you.
Separately, 100% of the people I’ve encountered using the word “based” are radical leftist transfolk, and there are like twelve of them?
I understood “based” to be a 4chan-ism but I didn’t think very hard about the example, it is possible I chose a word that does not actually work in the way I had meant to illustrate. Hopefully the intended meaning was still clear.