2 ms·
The popularity of the word “irregardless” demonstrates a property of human thought and socialization that’s very important to most people here: that the majorit
by swiley 6y ago
The popularity of the word “irregardless” demonstrates a property of human thought and socialization that’s very important to most people here: that the majority of people (at least those that speak English) are perfectly happy copying other people’s behavior without asking why. More complex examples of this come from studies where people struggle to communicate the difference between Boolean operators (specifically OR and XOR.)
My point is that this is a reminder of why we have software engineers and why cheap contractors, AI, and easier to use tooling (such as “graphical programming languages) haven’t been able to replace them: people think and speak too imprecisely to communicate even just software specifications correctly let alone implement them.
- hguant 6y agoI was a political philosophy major in college - it's interesting seeing how important being able to rigorously define what you're saying, and taking into account what your statements assume, is critically important for both engineering, and philosophy. ...also it turns out that dissecting a statement and pointing out the inconsistentsies is a great way to piss people off.
- posterboy 6y agoit's precisely the formal logic, albeit mostly in legal, that employs double negation to cover all bases, in case of doubt about the excluded middle, and importantly, to reverse liability of proof. You are not not an idiot. I didn't say you were one, but I will leave the proof to the opposite to somebody else. It might just be an intensifier, irregardless of the legalese, whenever it defaults to the law of excluded middle, that is, perhaps when the proof is not even considered relevant, whereas "regardless" implicitly connotes neglect. Regardless ofyou being an idiot. or Irregardless of you being perhaps an idiot. Alas, double negation tends to be not very stable in informal speach, e.g. any "some", not any "none", not not any: "some", "any" or "all". This involves type coercion from the gradual to the binary interpretation (and it's terribly difficult to make explicit, exactly not trivially simple at least).
- marcosdumay 6y ago> copying other people’s behavior without asking why Yielding to a shared meaning is the entire point of language.
- uniqueid 6y agoIndeed. If we didn't slavishly imitate the language of people around us, we'd have no languages at all. Even as things are, it takes a decade and a half for most people to master their own tongue.
- swiley 6y agoIt’s not the shared meaning that I’m talking about but its thoughtless acceptance.