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I'm an academic, and I rarely use absolutes such as 'always' or 'never' (this sentence being a good case). It's just so ingrained in academia that there are ve
by mbreese 16y ago
I'm an academic, and I rarely use absolutes such as 'always' or 'never' (this sentence being a good case). It's just so ingrained in academia that there are very few absolutes, and that there are almost always edge cases. As such, I refrain from making those statements...
But that doesn't make it any less tiring... my mental output filter requires a decent amount of effort to keep going and makes things more verbose...
- derefr 16y agoIn fact, since there are so few absolutes, both in and out of academia, it should be taken as a given that any time someone uses one, they are using it as a figure of speech; to actually come to their true, basically-now-jargon meanings of universal quantification, the speaker must add further words. It's basic Huffman encoding: the figurative use occurs much more frequently, so it gets the short means of expression.